I had never heard of Bending Spoons before.
Their Wikipedia article makes them sound like kind of a failure, but the entire second half of the page is talking about all of their acquisitions, more than one of which cost over $1 billion.
So what am I missing? How did this company get so much money?
Dark-patterns all the way.
They have tiny internal teams split per product with the sole purpose of hiding the "not now" button as much as possible to increase trials and purchases.
Absolutely cancer of a company, run away if you see their name on anything.
Maybe they just run companies like they should be run when VC money runs out. Which is somewhat hard for consumers that have gotten used to getting everything for free.
ZIRP era with free flowing money, probably did lot of bad in this respect. Running products cost actual money. And those surviving on advertising is more limited group.
I guess by offering consistent long term cashflows you can attract classic institutional investors, and banks. Europe is much better at that than it is at finding VC cash for a moonshot
I noticed that, too. If one only had the wikipedia article to go on, it would appear that they made way too much money with the covid app for Italy. Which is probably true, but probably not billions?! So, after reading another article[1] (which does not really give strong pointers but leads to) my conclusion would be that they simply somehow became a darling for investors and could finance all these big acquisitions.
[1]https://weeklysiliconvalley.com/bending-spoons-from-humble-b...