Evernote agrees to be acquired by Milan-based app developer Bending Spoons, in a transaction expected to close in early 2023; Evernote has raised $290M to date
Context & Ripple Effects
Evernote enters this sale already shrunk: the company had wound down its Market e-commerce effort years earlier as its core note-taking business stagnated, and founder Phil Libin had long moved on, raising $100M for his video startup Mmhmm in 2021. The $290M raised to date against an undisclosed price frames the deal as an exit for a once-defining consumer SaaS brand rather than a growth acquisition.
First-order effects
- Evernote's US-based employees and product roadmap now answer to a Milan-based owner whose model is cost discipline, not feature expansion — the buyer's playbook, not Evernote's, sets priorities from close.
- Bending Spoons adds a recognizable but distressed consumer SaaS asset to a portfolio it is assembling with fresh capital, having raised $155M at a $2.6B valuation in 2024 to fund exactly this kind of acquisition.
Second-order effects
- The deal establishes the template Bending Spoons repeats with WeTransfer, a file-sharing service that abandoned its IPO — distressed SaaS assets that can't go public independently get rolled into the Milan portfolio instead.
- Evernote's operations migrate toward Europe, culminating in the 2023 decision to lay off most remaining US and Chile staff and relocate nearly all operations — a forced response for any vendor selling into US enterprise buyers who now face a European-run supplier.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, consumer SaaS consolidates around European roll-up vehicles rather than US strategic buyers or public markets, with Bending Spoons' distressed-SaaS profile and eventual Nasdaq listing marking the structural endpoint: a Milan-based internet company built from other people's startups.
The trend: Distressed consumer SaaS is consolidating into Milan-based Bending Spoons' portfolio, which buys what can't IPO independently and rebuilds it on a European cost base.