Hopin To Be Acquired by Bending Spoons

Technology firm Bending Spoons will acquire Hopin and its current product lines of StreamYard, Streamable, and Superwave. Hopin announced the acquisition on Tuesday. The deal is focused on the StreamYard product and user base, which Hopin acquired for $250 million in January 2021.

“Our goal is to take StreamYard’s remarkable solutions to new heights, leveraging our expertise and technology,” Luca Ferrari, co-founder and CEO of Bending Spoons, said in a statement.

The Milan-based Bending Spoons confirmed the agreement but did not disclose financial details. Hopin closed its UK entity in February, moving all its operations to the U.S. and rebranding to StreamYard Top Corp.

Hopin was valued at $7.75 billion at the peak of the Covid pandemic-led rush to virtual events. The company divested its events business in August 2023. Acquiring company RingCentral paid a starting price of $15 million and rebranded the product to RingCentral Events.

“Our team has built incredible brands, technologies, and global communities across our suite of products comprised of StreamYard, Streamable, and Superwave. We are grateful to our team and customers and look forward to seeing the business and products grow to the next level with Bending Spoons,” said Hopin CEO Badri Rajasekar.

Rajasekar joined Hopin when video technology company Jamm, which he founded in 2019, was acquired by Hopin in March 2021. He has held the top job since Founder Johnny Boufarhat stepped down in August 2023.

Meet Bending Spoons

The company has received over $700 in funding. The latest round of $155 million in equity financing coming two months ago at a post-money valuation of $2.55 billion. At the time, the company projected $500 million in sales this year after taking in $360 million in 2023. It counts over 500 million downloads and has 100 million monthly active users across its apps. Bending Spoons has publicly expressed its desire to acquire technology companies.

Bending Spoons is primarily an app company. It is most famous for its photo editing app Remini, which recently topped the App Store with viral AI shots. It also owns the social gathering app Meetup, acquired this January, and Evernote, acquired in November 2022. Two other popular apps are 30 Day Fitness and Live Quiz. The company was founded in 2013 in Copenhagen, Denmark, and moved its operations to Milan, Italy. Four of its five founders are Italian.

StreamYard will complement Bending Spoons’s product lineup, including the mobile video editing app Splice acquired from GoPro in 2018, which Go Pro acquired in 2016.  In June 2022, the company raised over $340 million from investors, including Hollywood actor Ryan Reynolds and Kerry Trainor, the former CEO of Vimeo, the video streaming platform. In March, Bloomberg reported the company’s interest in acquiring Vimeo.

Profit-Focused Business Model

Bending Spoons’ business model for some of the products it has acquired involves limiting free offerings, raising prices, and moving to a subscription in place of a one-time fee. These changes have attracted the ire of some users. For example, it recently severely limited the usability of the free version of Evernote to 50 notes. It also significantly increased subscription prices, causing users to voice concerns about its business model. With Filmic, a video recording app acquired in September of 2022, it changed the pricing model for new users from a one-off payment to a subscription.

The company has also laid staff of several acquired companies to make them leaner. After acquiring Evernote in November 2022, TechCrunch reported laying off 129 staff in February 2023. In November 2023, productivity app-finding site Tool Finder reported that the remaining Evernote employees had been laid off. The same pattern happened at Filmic, where Bending Spoons laid off the entire staff of Filmic in December 2023 after acquiring the company in September 2022.

Current StreamYard users, which at the time of its acquisition in 2021 totaled 100,000, may be weary of price changes that will affect them. The platform is popular for powering virtual events and live streams. 

It is unclear what, if anything, Bending Spoons will do with Hopin’s two other product lines, the video hosting platform Streamable and the recently announced community platform Superwave. 

Bending Spoons did not respond to Skift Meetings’ request for comment.