Evernote has laid off most of its US staff and will move most operations to Europe

Note-taking company Evernote has laid off most of its US- and- Chile-based employees, the company announced yesterday. Now Italian parent company Bending Spoons is taking most of Evernote’s operations to Europe.

The company says the step is intended to “boost operational efficiency and to make the most of the Bending Spoons employer brand, which is extremely strong in Europe.”

Bending Spoons acquired Evernote in November last year, and at the time, Evernote CEO was quoted as saying the deal would help the company work on building new features, using Bending Spoons’ “proven app expertise and wide range of proprietary technologies.” The company previously laid off 129 workers in February, with a Bending Spoons representative telling Tech Crunch at the time that the company’s unprofitable nature was “unsustainable in the long term.”

Evernote said in its announcement yesterday that its employees were told on July 5th that the layoffs would happen, and has offered the employees 16 weeks of severance, a performance bonus, and up to a year’s worth of health insurance coverage.

Evernote became one of the first popular note-taking apps when it launched in 2008, but has struggled since the mid-2010s as other, similar apps began to steal some of its thunder and the company has found itself bogged down in messes of its own making. After weathering complaints about it’s app’s bugginess and losing several executives, Evernote somehow made it out of its “death spiral” of 2016, a year in which it raised prices and was forced to renege on a controversial privacy policy that previously gave no option to opt out of employees looking at users’ content.

We’ve reached out to both Evernote and Bending Spoons for comment.

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