Who owns Vimeo? Ownership structure explained (2026)

Vimeo is a video software platform. It hosts, manages, and distributes video for creators and, increasingly, for businesses that use video for training, marketing, and internal communication. For most of its life it was known as the tasteful, ad-free alternative to YouTube, a home for filmmakers and animators rather than a mass-market feed.

The ownership question has a clean answer today and a tangled history behind it. As of late 2025, Vimeo, Inc. is a wholly owned subsidiary of Bending Spoons, so the company has exactly one owner. That single-owner structure replaced a public shareholder base of index funds, retail traders, and the media mogul Barry Diller, whose IAC had controlled Vimeo since 2006 and spun it off in 2021.

Understanding who owns Vimeo means tracing three distinct eras: the founder years, two decades inside Diller's IAC empire, and a short, difficult run as a standalone public stock that ended in a take-private. This article follows that chain to the people and firms who actually control the platform now.

Vimeo began in late 2004 as a side project. Jake Lodwick and Zach Klein built it while working at Connected Ventures, the company behind the comedy site CollegeHumor. Lodwick coined the name as a play on "video" and "me," and it doubles as an anagram of "movie." The early pitch was simple: a cleaner, higher-quality place to share personal videos.

In 2006, the media conglomerate IAC, controlled by Barry Diller, bought Connected Ventures for a reported $30 million, mainly to own the CollegeHumor audience. After Google acquired YouTube later that year, IAC redirected attention to Vimeo as a curated, premium counterweight to YouTube's scale. Lodwick and Klein both left by 2009, and IAC ran Vimeo for the next twelve years, shifting it from an ad-supported consumer site to a subscription software business for creators.

IAC spun Vimeo off as an independent, separately traded public company in May 2021, listing it on the Nasdaq under the ticker VMEO. The timing caught the pandemic video boom near its peak. Growth then slowed sharply, the stock fell, and Vimeo repositioned around enterprise video software. For 2024, Vimeo reported revenue of about $417 million, roughly flat year over year, with net income near $27 million and adjusted EBITDA of about $55 million. Vimeo Enterprise, the fastest-growing part of the business, grew revenue about 47% to $83 million and ended the year with roughly 4,000 enterprise subscribers. That mix of a large legacy base and a smaller high-growth segment is the kind of profile a business valuation calculator helps frame.

Vimeo is no longer publicly traded. On September 10, 2025, it agreed to be acquired by Bending Spoons in an all-cash deal valued at about $1.38 billion, and the transaction closed on November 24, 2025. Vimeo, Inc. became a direct, wholly owned subsidiary of Bending Spoons US, Inc., and its shares stopped trading on the Nasdaq. There is now a single owner, and no outside public shareholders remain.

That is a sharp break from the prior structure. From May 2021 to November 2025, Vimeo was a dispersed public company with thousands of holders. Since the buyout, the only ownership that matters sits one level up, at Bending Spoons and the people who own it.

Neither founder owns any of Vimeo today. Jake Lodwick and Zach Klein created the platform in 2004 but left by 2009, well before it became a large business or a public company. There was never a founder-held control block, no special founder share class, and no meaningful residual stake. Klein went on to other ventures, and Lodwick moved on to separate projects. The founder era shaped the product's identity, but it left no imprint on the cap table.

Most of Vimeo's outside capital came in a burst around the 2021 spin-off, when IAC raised private money to set valuation before listing the shares. The take-private in 2025 then retired all of that public equity at a fraction of the peak.

The pre-spin-off rounds valued Vimeo above $5 billion. Four years later, Bending Spoons acquired the whole company for about $1.38 billion, a reminder of how far the shares fell after the pandemic-era surge faded.

While Vimeo was public, its register looked like that of most mid-cap US stocks, with one large exception. The Vanguard Group was the biggest institutional holder at roughly 11%, followed by BlackRock near 9% and State Street around 4%. These are passive index managers that held VMEO because it sat inside the indexes they track, not because of any active view on video software.

The exception was the IAC camp. Barry Diller, IAC's chairman, together with Alexander von Furstenberg and related entities, controlled roughly 38% of Vimeo's total voting power through a high-vote class of stock, even though their economic stake was smaller. Joseph Levin, IAC's CEO and the chairman of Vimeo's board, held about 2% of the voting power. That concentration meant that, despite a public float, Diller's IAC network held effective control right up until the sale. All of those stakes were cashed out at $7.85 per share in the Bending Spoons deal.

As a listed company, Vimeo filed quarterly and annual reports with the Securities and Exchange Commission and answered to a public board. The dual-class share structure gave insiders more votes per share than ordinary holders, a common arrangement for IAC spin-offs that kept control with Diller's group. The take-private ended all of it. Vimeo no longer files public financials, no longer has a public board accountable to outside shareholders, and operates inside Bending Spoons' private structure.

Real control now sits with Bending Spoons, the Milan-based technology company founded in 2013 by four university friends: Luca Ferrari, Matteo Danieli, Francesco Patarnello, and Luca Querella. Ferrari is the co-founder and CEO. Bending Spoons runs a buy-and-operate model, acquiring established but stalled software products and consolidating them onto shared engineering, marketing, and infrastructure. Its portfolio includes Evernote, WeTransfer, Meetup, Brightcove, and the AOL brand. Vimeo is one more asset in that roll-up, and its strategy is now set by Bending Spoons rather than by an independent Vimeo board.

Philip Moyer became Vimeo's CEO in April 2024, arriving from Google Cloud, where he had helped lead its generative AI push. He steered Vimeo toward an AI-first, enterprise-focused strategy and was in charge when the board agreed to the Bending Spoons sale. In February 2026, shortly after the deal closed, Moyer left to become president and CEO of McGraw Hill. His departure underlines that the pre-acquisition leadership did not stay to run the business under its new owner.

Bending Spoons typically installs its own leaders and integrates each acquired company into its central operating model. In line with that pattern, it restructured Vimeo quickly, cutting a large share of the staff in January 2026 as it folded the platform into its portfolio. Day-to-day authority now runs up to Ferrari and the Bending Spoons executive team rather than to a standalone Vimeo chief executive answerable to public shareholders.

The take-private price highlights how much value evaporated after 2021. Private investors backed Vimeo above $5 billion just before the spin-off, and the stock briefly traded far higher during the pandemic video boom. The $7.85 per share that Bending Spoons paid was a 91% premium over Vimeo's 60-day average price at the time of the deal, yet it still valued the entire company at about $1.38 billion. Long-term holders who bought near the peak realized large losses, a common source of investor frustration and, in many take-privates, shareholder litigation. Comparing the peak private marks to the final equity value shows the scale of the reset.

Within two months of closing, Bending Spoons cut a large majority of Vimeo's workforce in January 2026. The move fit Bending Spoons' standard playbook, which centralizes functions across its portfolio and runs acquired products with far smaller teams, but it drew criticism from staff and from the creative community that had long identified with the platform. For a business built partly on creator goodwill, the reputational cost of mass layoffs is a real risk, the kind an organization tracks in a risk register.

Vimeo has faced long-running copyright exposure as a host of user-uploaded video. The most prominent case, brought by Capitol Records and other labels, ran for years and centered on whether Vimeo qualified for safe-harbor protection under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act for older sound recordings in user videos. Courts largely sided with Vimeo's safe-harbor defense, but the case illustrates the standing legal risk any video platform carries. Content liability, moderation, and licensing remain durable pressures on the business regardless of who owns it.

Vimeo's identity as a haven for filmmakers and animators sat awkwardly with its shift toward enterprise software and, later, absorption into an app conglomerate. Observers described the sale as the close of an internet-animation era, given how central Vimeo had been to that community. The tension between serving creators and maximizing software revenue is a strategic risk as much as a cultural one, and it shapes how Vimeo competes with YouTube and other platforms. Mapping those competing audiences is a classic use for a competitive analysis framework.

Ownership determines who sets Vimeo's priorities, and that has changed completely. Under IAC, Vimeo was a controlled public company, run for growth but ultimately answerable to Barry Diller's group and to index-fund shareholders. Under Bending Spoons, it is a private asset inside a roll-up whose declared strategy is to buy established software, cut costs, and run it for profit and cash generation. The swift, deep layoffs signal that efficiency, not expansion, is now the operating goal.

The move from public to private also changes transparency. As a listed company, Vimeo disclosed detailed financials every quarter, which let customers, competitors, and creators see exactly how the enterprise pivot was tracking. Those numbers, including the margins an observer could test with an EBITDA calculator, are now hidden inside Bending Spoons. The public will learn far less about how Vimeo performs, and what it does learn will be filtered through its owner's reporting.

For the enterprise customers Vimeo now targets, the new owner cuts both ways. Bending Spoons has scale, capital, and a track record of keeping acquired products alive, which the growth of the enterprise software segment made central to Vimeo's value. But its cost-first model can mean thinner support teams and slower feature work than a standalone, growth-focused company would provide. Buyers are effectively betting on Bending Spoons' willingness to keep investing in the product.

Finally, the ownership chain now runs to a company that is itself public. Bending Spoons listed on the Nasdaq in July 2026 at a valuation reported around $18 billion, after private rounds valued it near $11 billion in late 2025. That means Vimeo, once a public stock in its own right, is again indirectly owned by public investors, only now as one line item inside a much larger portfolio rather than as a company they can buy directly.

Vimeo is owned by Bending Spoons, a Milan-based technology company that acquired it in an all-cash deal that closed on November 24, 2025. Vimeo, Inc. is now a wholly owned subsidiary of Bending Spoons US, Inc. and is no longer publicly traded. Before the buyout, Vimeo was an independent public company spun off from IAC in 2021.

No. Vimeo traded on the Nasdaq under the ticker VMEO from May 2021 until the Bending Spoons acquisition closed in November 2025, when it was delisted and taken private. Its parent, Bending Spoons, went public on the Nasdaq in July 2026, so Vimeo is now indirectly owned by public investors through its parent rather than traded on its own.

Vimeo was founded in 2004 by Jake Lodwick and Zach Klein, who built it as a side project while working at Connected Ventures, the parent of CollegeHumor. IAC acquired Connected Ventures in 2006, and both founders had left by 2009. Neither retains any ownership stake today.

Philip Moyer led Vimeo as CEO from April 2024 through the Bending Spoons sale, then left in February 2026 to become CEO of McGraw Hill. Since the acquisition, Vimeo has been run inside Bending Spoons' portfolio, whose co-founder and CEO is Luca Ferrari, rather than by an independent Vimeo chief executive.

During its public years, Vimeo's largest institutional holders were index managers, led by The Vanguard Group at about 11% and BlackRock near 9%. Barry Diller's IAC group, including Alexander von Furstenberg, controlled roughly 38% of the voting power through a high-vote share class. All of those stakes were bought out at $7.85 per share in the Bending Spoons deal.

Bending Spoons acquired Vimeo for about $1.38 billion in cash, or $7.85 per share. That represented a 91% premium over Vimeo's 60-day average share price when the deal was announced in September 2025, but it was well below the more than $5 billion valuation Vimeo carried in private rounds just before its 2021 spin-off from IAC.