Meetup
“Can Meetup survive as a profitable niche community platform under Bending Spoons' operational model after being hollowed out by COVID and WeWork's collapse?”
Founded in 2002 as a community platform enabling real-world group gatherings, Meetup grew steadily on an organizer subscription model. WeWork acquired it in 2017 as part of a broader 'physical community' thesis, but the COVID-19 pandemic decimated in-person event attendance and WeWork's own financial collapse forced a distressed sale to AlleyCorp in 2020. Bending Spoons subsequently acquired Meetup, repositioning it within a portfolio of consumer apps focused on monetization optimization. The embedded finance stack remains simple — event payment collection via Stripe and historically WePay — reflecting the platform's role as a community facilitator rather than a financial services company.