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Bending Spoons attracted major investors
Italian startup Bending Spoons held a funding round that raised $340 million. Investors came from various sectors, such as actor Ryan Reynolds and former Vimeo platform head Kerry Trainor. According to unverified reports, Eric Schmidt, who holds an executive position at Google Corporation, is also among the investors. Bending Spoons is best known for its video and image editing applications, which are based on AI technology.
The company said that it plans to use the funds to develop current and future projects, as well as for interesting acquisitions.
Bending Spoons has been developing mobile apps since 2013 and is headquartered in Milan. The startup has created products for Apple’s iOS operating system, including 30 Day Fitness and Live Quiz. The company holds one of the first places in the world in terms of the number of downloads. Since its inception and up to this year, that figure has exceeded 500 million, and the number of active users of its products is more than 90 million people every month.
Bending Spoons became even more popular during the pandemic when it introduced the Immuni app. It allowed us to track the number of sick people in Italy. The product was developed with the support of the government, and Bending Spoons ended up licensing the Italian authorities to use the app for free. The product was released in June 2020 and initially worked only in 4 regions of the country, but it soon began to provide information on the number of infected people all over Italy. In just 10 days since its launch, Immuni has been downloaded 2.2 million times. The app was the first in Europe to collect such information.
In 2019, Bending Spoons introduced the Playond service, which provides access to more than 60 mobile games for a fee. For this purpose, the company partnered with various game studios from different countries, thanks to which premium games became available to App Store users at a reasonable cost. The purpose of Bending Spoons when launching Playond’s service was to change the trends that have formed in the mobile games market. Many users prefer free-to-play games or limited versions, and as a result, many projects remain without the attention they deserve. The Italian company made premium games much more available for a great number of gamers. This, in turn, has drawn attention to promising studios that create quality products for mobile devices.
Playond offers games from various genres, its assortment is regularly replenished and includes both well-known games that are already loved by gamers and new ones.