On September 10, 2025, Vimeo confirmed its sale to Italian tech company Bending Spoons. In response to the buy-out, S/W co-founder and former head of Vimeo Staff Picks, Jason Sondhi, offers his perspective on the acquisition and explores what the change could mean for Vimeo’s future and its community of users.

It feels out of the blue, yet makes total sense. While the Vimeo of the 2010s, the beloved video platform/community of choice for the global creative class, has been gone for a while, the slow-dawning realization of this reality by filmmakers has overshadowed the fact that the business itself has been in freefall post-COVID.

Vimeo was spun out of IAC as a public company in 2021 at a valuation of $8.5B. It is now being taken private again by the Italian company Bending Spoons for just $1.38B. Even that number represents a premium of 91% over Vimeo’s 60-day, volume-weighted average share price.

I don’t want to go over the timeline, but I thought that this post, while hyperbolic in that LinkedIn sort of way, does a phenomenal job of laying out the key pivot points that, over the past decade, led Vimeo to this spot.

So, who is Bending Spoons? It’s a portfolio company of brands targeted for rehabilitation. They look for legacy tech companies that have fallen on hard times but still possess cachet and decent customer bases. In recent years, they’ve bought Evernote, WeTransfer, and Meetup. Then, following a private equity-style playbook, they look to be ruthlessly efficient in minimizing costs and maximizing revenue, bringing fresh expertise and perspective in hopes of getting dysfunctional companies unstuck.

It’s unclear what this means for Vimeo, and the press release for the deal is fairly boilerplate regarding Bending Spoons’ vision. But, for those of us who pine for a revival of Vimeo’s creator-centric vibe and ecosystem, I’m moderately pessimistic. Improvement is possible—Bending Spoons doesn’t like to think of themselves as simple efficiency consultants; the company has product and engineering chops of its own, and justifiably touts the massive improvements they have made to Evernote. Yet, impressions elsewhere are not so rosy, as observers and users of WeTransfer have decried Bending Spoon decisions, including laying off 75% of the existing team upon takeover, and capping the services’ free tier.

Vimeo could use some basic discipline—the company’s subreddit is rife with complaints of predatory billing practices, and its withdrawal from the EU last year was so ineptly communicated that its support staff took to linking users to my speculative and completely unreported newsletter post to explain what the hell was going on. Still, it had been taking some positive steps—as recently as a month ago, I optimistically wondered if the company was trying to lure audiences back. This acquisition throws that into question.

If Bending Spoons wants to support these baby steps, I’ll be happy. And I do want to add that, even amidst the long stretch of decline of the Vimeo community during the company’s B2B pivot, the Curation Team has done strong work. Leadership across regimes has supported the team with resources for travel, events, and prizes, even though their work no longer aligned with strategic priorities. It is possible that Bending Spoons follows suit and increases investment in Curation as a pillar of the company’s rejuvenation. 

But, Bending Spoons, to my knowledge, haven’t demonstrated any interest or expertise in community-building. What they have done is increase prices, but penny-pinching around functionality is part of what has turned Vimeo’s core subscribers off in recent years. Ultimately, even $1.38B is pricey for an unprofitable company, and so my mind ponders the AI question. Vimeo came out strongly in 2024, saying they will not use customer videos to train AI. Will Bending Spoons honor that promise? The company sparked backlash in July with the clumsy rollout of new terms of service for WeTransfer, a move many people suspected as a sneaky attempt to approve AI training on users’ files. The Vimeo collection would figure to be a goldmine in the AI wars. Either way, we’ll be paying close attention.

Editors Notes: This article is excerpted from our free Shorts Weekly newsletter. Written by our co-founder, Jason Sondhi, he delivers a digest of short film news and insight into the world of indie filmmaking every Friday. Join 60,000 readers and click here to subscribe.