Evernote

Evernote was founded to build a 'second brain' for its users: a cross-platform note-taking and personal-productivity application that lets people capture, organize, and search text, images, audio, scanned documents, and web clippings across every device they own. The company traces its origins to work Stepan Pachikov began around 2000-2002 on memory-augmentation software; Pachikov incorporated Evernote Corporation in Sunnyvale, California in 2005 and merged with Phil Libin's Ribbon venture in 2006, with Libin becoming CEO. The consumer app launched in private beta in 2008 and grew almost entirely through organic, word-of-mouth adoption rather than paid marketing, reaching profitability within three years and eventually more than 100 million registered users by 2015 and an often-cited peak of roughly 225-250 million users worldwide by the time of its 2022 acquisition. Evernote became one of Silicon Valley's earliest 'unicorns,' crossing a $1 billion valuation with its May 2012 Series D round and reaching an implied ~$2 billion valuation with a follow-on growth/secondary financing that November. Starting around 2012-2013, the company pursued a series of product distractions (Evernote Food, Evernote Hello, Evernote Peek, a branded-merchandise Evernote Market) that diluted its brand and diverted engineering resources away from fixing well-documented reliability and sync-bug complaints, and growth stalled. Phil Libin stepped down as CEO in July 2015, replaced by former Google executive Chris O'Neill, and the company laid off about 18% of its workforce that October while closing three of ten offices. A 2018 rebrand and a wave of senior-executive departures (CTO, CFO, CPO, head of HR) that September were widely read as signs of continued distress; Ian Small (formerly of TokBox) became CEO in October 2018 and led a multi-year effort to stabilize the product, including a migration to Google Cloud infrastructure. Bending Spoons S.p.A., an Italian mobile-app company, announced an agreement to acquire Evernote on 2022-11-16, and the deal closed on 2023-01-03 for a reported price of approximately $199.7 million -- a fraction of the roughly $262 million-plus in venture funding and the $1B+ valuations Evernote once commanded. Under Bending Spoons, Evernote underwent an aggressive restructuring: headcount reportedly fell from roughly 341 employees to as few as 60 within about a year of the deal closing, all remaining U.S. staff were laid off in mid-2023, and operations were consolidated into Bending Spoons' Milan, Italy base, with the product rebuilt on Bending Spoons' shared technology stack. As of 2026, Evernote continues to operate as a paid/freemium note-taking app under Bending Spoons (which also owns WeTransfer, Meetup, AOL, Vimeo, and other legacy consumer brands), with a much smaller team, reported at roughly 180 employees company-wide as of mid-2026 after some post-acquisition rehiring.