Big news! Today we’re announcing that Bento was acquired by Linktree. It's a symbiotic relationship — a collaboration between an experienced category leader and a driven, curious upstart.
Linktree created a category - it revolutionized the way millions of users around the globe showcase their entire digital universe in one simple, yet powerful link. When we started Bento, we took a strong visual approach when designing the product and endeavored to set a new standard for visual expression online.
The combination of our design approach and spirit of exploration, together with Linktree's foundational experience, global reach, and passion for their users will be a massive benefit for the entire community.
At Bento, our aim was to offer everyone on the internet a beautiful personal page that showcases their colorful personality. We wanted to bring delight, self-expression, and curation to the forefront. These values are at the core of how we built Bento, and Linktree shares those values, which is what makes this news so exciting.
We perceive links as gateways to your identity, fragments of a story that define you. Whether it's your social media profiles, Maps location, or your remarkably quirky taste in music - we aimed to aggregate these fragments to show what makes you, you.
Linktree has been a tremendous source of inspiration and guidance for us at Bento. They are the creators of the category, built an incredibly powerful product, and have achieved astonishing scale over the years. Naturally, Linktree co-founder and CEO Alex and I started to explore opportunities for collaboration, uniting our expertise and shared commitment to change.
Our conversations felt incredibly organic. Alex and I often found ourselves aligned, as if we were already part of the same company. We shared similar visions and complemented each other's blind spots. Most importantly, Alex shares Bento's obsession with users, design, and delight. Linktree, like Bento, places creators at the heart of their product and plays a pivotal role in their success.
As our discussions progressed, it became evident that joining forces would supercharge our pursuit of a shared vision and Linktree’s mission: empowering anyone to curate and own their digital universe.
While this is not the end of the story, it is the closing of a chapter, and we want to thank the Bento community, our investors, and friends who helped us reach this milestone. You bet on us before there was a reason to do so and we will always be grateful. It has been fantastic to shape the product with our growing number of users and to receive so much love for Bento from around the globe.
The whole team will join Linktree later this month.
As far as next steps and what this means for your Bento, nothing is changing today. We will be in touch over the coming weeks as we integrate into Linktree and will keep you abreast of all changes.
Bento stands for the immense impact a small team can have, that deeply cares for their craft and for its community. We look forward to everything that’s ahead and continuing to help everyone curate and own their digital universe.
Finally, here's a word from Linktree's co-founder & CEO Alex:
„We’ve seen a lot of competitors come and go as the category we created, and continue to lead, exploded. We look at numerous opportunities and rarely do we find a company and competitor that aligns with our strategy, cares for Linkers, and accelerates our growth and vision of empowering anyone to curate and grow their digital universe. Bento stood out above all others for a few key reasons:
Creator and Community Centric Product – creators are at the forefront of Bento, full stop. And you see it in the way they have developed, designed, built and shipped a product tailored to their needs as well as fostered an engaged community. Bento, just like Linktree, puts creators at the heart of the product and is central to its success as a platform.
Visually Powerful – they’ve built a platform based in visual expression and that vision is fully aligned with our strategy and direction as we continue to uplevel Linktree and the category we created.
A Shared Passion of our Category – the Bento team shares our same passion for building products that empower anyone to curate and own their digital identity. We have a shared vision for what our category can be and the impact we can have on creators around the world.“