Bending Spoons to Fire 75% of WeTransfer’s Staff After July Acquisition

Bending Spoons acquired file-sharing platform WeTransfer in July and has now laid off 75% of WeTransfer’s staff.

The Italian app company Bending Spoons has confirmed the layoffs to TechCrunch, which comprise at least 260 people based on WeTransfer’s employee headcount of around 350 people.

The acquire-and-fire approach is typical for Bending Spoons, which also counts Evernote, Meetup, Remini, Splice, and Streamyard among its portfolio. For the photo and video community, Bending Spoons’ 2023 acquisition, Filmic (often stylized as “FiLMiC”), is perhaps its best-known asset. Filmic wasn’t immune to Bending Spoons’ typical strategy, either, as Filmic’s entire staff was laid off by Bending Spoons last December.

At the time, Bending Spoons said that Filmic’s product had been entirely integrated into the Bending Spoons platform, and the product would continue with internal oversight.

This rough news arrived just over a year after Filmic described being bought by Bending Spoons as great news for the company.

“The support of Bending Spoons will help fuel our plans for growth, accelerate our development cycles, and ultimately build an even stronger, more valuable Filmic experience for our customers in the ever-expanding Creator Community,” Filmic said when it was acquired in September 2022.

This emphasis on internal management and development is echoed in Bending Spoons’ explanation for letting so many people from WeTransfer go.

“Once the vision is clear, we try to close the gap between the status quo and the vision as quickly and as fully as we can. Typically, doing so involves making major changes to many areas, including the organization,” says Bending Spoons CEO Luca Ferrari. “While we don’t enjoy making painful or unpopular decisions, we’re prepared to do so when we believe it’s the right thing to do to help the business thrive.”

Ferrari adds that for WeTransfer, Bending Spoons wants a much smaller team focused on WeTransfer’s long-term success and viability.

Naturally, some employees will no longer be necessary when a company is acquired. Bending Spoons has its own employees handling various tasks that would have overlapped with some members of WeTransfer’s team. However, it is notable that Bending Spoons cuts so much staff from so many of its acquisitions.

Beyond letting go the entirety of Filmic’s team, Bending Spoons cut 129 employees from Evernote, and Meetup underwent significant restructuring after it was bought.

As for precisely what the layoffs mean for WeTransfer, Ferrari has been vague. “I won’t be more specific at this stage because the layoff hasn’t been fully defined yet,” he told Reuters. Following a $155 million investment injection earlier this year and its various acquisitions, Bending Spoons is reportedly worth more than $2.5 billion.