WeTransfer Scooped Up by Filmic Pro’s Parent Company Bending Spoons
Bending Spoons, the Italy-based app developer that purchased Filmic in 2022, has added another big name to its portfolio: WeTransfer.
The purchase of the file-sharing platform was announced today via a joint statement and is the latest in a string of companies to be scooped up by Bending Spoons. Reuters reports it is the fifth acquisition in 2024 alone following a $155 million capital raise which took Bending Spoons’ valuation to $2.55 billion.
WeTransfer flirted with an initial public offering in Amsterdam in 2022 but backed out due to what it blamed on market volatility at the time, Reuters reports.
“Over the last decade, WeTransfer has grown from a beautifully simple file-sharing tool into a highly profitable and impactful platform trusted by millions of creative professionals and creators. In the last few years, the business has seen a period of accelerated growth, fueled by strategic product development, resulting in the platform serving more than 600,000 subscribers and 80 million monthly active users. Additionally, nurturing creative communities and amplifying their voices has been key to our success,” WeTransfer CEO Alexander Vassilev says of the acquisition.
“Some of Bending Spoons’ most successful products are tools that serve creativity, therefore we are confident that this milestone will complement both businesses, supercharge our growth, and help us create even more value for creative industries at large.”
This is similar language to how Filmic Pro described its situation when Bending Spoons acquired it in 2022: “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.”
The companies did not say whether or not all staff or leadership at WeTransfer would be maintained after the conclusion of the acquisition. That may come into question since Bending Spoons does have a track record of buying completed products, training its internal staff on their upkeep, and then releasing the original development team.
That happened in late 2023 with Filmic Pro, despite what the company said about the acquisition initially. After what Bending Spoons described as having the Filmic products “fully integrated into the Bending Spoons platform,” the company laid off the entire staff including the company’s founder and CEO about a year later.
Development and management of the app have been handled internally by Bending Spoons ever since. The purchase of WeTransfer is a significantly higher-profile product and it remains to be seen if Bending Spoons will treat it differently than it did Filmic.
