In a statement released by the Italian tech-company, which develops mobile applications globally in the creator economy, it is announced that a staff reduction process has begun that will affect 75 per cent of the staff at WeTransfer, a company that was just acquired last month.
By the end of 2022, the Italian scaleup had closed a EUR 340 million round, and in May it received a EUR 70 million loan for its internationalisation strategy, a loan supported by Sace and Intesa Sanpaolo.
Founded in Copenhagen in 2013, Bending Spoons moved its headquarters to Italy in 2014, the home country of four of its five founders; today, around 350 highly qualified employees, with more than 70 per cent from a technical background, mainly engineers and scientists, work at its offices in Milan. The company has a portfolio of over 20 apps in the photovideo, e.g. Remini and Splice, and healthfitness categories. To date, the company has over 500 million downloads and 90 million monthly active users.
Bending Spoons strategy for WeTransfer
“In this specific case, the vision we have developed is that of a smaller and more focused WeTransfer structure, which we believe is better positioned to ensure the success of the company with a long-term vision,” says Bending Spoons CEO Luca Ferrari in the note. “This decision, although difficult, was made in line with that vision. I will not go into details at this stage, as the staff reduction has not yet been fully defined. We informed everyone as soon as possible, even though we were not able to provide all the details, because we felt it was the most transparent and respectful way to deal with a difficult situation’.
This was revealed by TechCrunch, which had already written last month about how the Milan-based company would routinely lay off staff in companies it acquires. In February 2023, it had laid off 129 staff members at Evernote, while in December 2023, it cut all employees at Filmic, which it acquired in 2022.
Bending Spoons is a feather in our government’s cap. In May, MIMIT had presented Accenture’s report on the impacts of artificial intelligence throughout the value chain, during the 20th Leonardo Committee Forum. And among the guests at the table was Matteo Danieli, co-founder and CPO of Bending Spoons.
With a valuation in excess of $2.5 billion and with a strategy of this kind, Bending Spoons raises important ethical questions about this type of operation: while it shows that innovation and growth often require deep restructuring, which can include significant staff reductions, from an ethical point of view, these actions can be perceived as an example of a strictly profit-oriented view, justified of course by the type of market in which they operate. But how sustainable is such a model in the long term with its impact? Such practices are not new in the tech world, Microsoft, in 2014, after the acquisition of Nokia’s mobile division, laid off thousands of employees, and more recently, Meta (Facebook), made numerous layoffs in 2022 and 2023, drastically reducing staff after acquiring several companies and facing an industry crisis.
What the staff of Bending Spoons will have to study is how it will do this in the different countries where WeTransfer is based, precisely because of the impact, also legislative, that this will have on employee welfare. And above all, should Bending Spoons meet the criteria of CSRD – the European Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive that requires transparent reporting of its environmental, social and governance (ESG) practices and impacts – redundancy decisions could be subject to increased scrutiny in the area of social sustainability, one of the core aspects of CSRD. And given recent successes and acquisitions, it could reach the requirements for applicability in the near future if not already included.
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