Berkshire Hathaway has disclosed a $330 million stake in Milan-based Bending Spoons, bringing its total investment to over $900 million as the Italian holding company accelerates acquisitions of AI-displaced software companies including Airtable and Miro.
Berkshire Hathaway has deepened its bet on Milan-based holding company Bending Spoons, disclosing a $330 million stake that brings its total investment in the firm to more than $900 million, as Bending Spoons accelerates its strategy of acquiring software companies sidelined by the artificial intelligence boom.
The disclosure landed Wednesday and sent Bending Spoons' stock up 41% before some gains reversed. The company closed Friday at $47.07, giving it a market cap of roughly $30 billion. Bending Spoons held its Nasdaq IPO on June 30, raising about $1.7 billion at $29 a share.
Analysts at Mizuho called the additional stake "another vote of confidence in the Bending Spoons model from one of the world's most respected long-term investors."
Bending Spoons was founded in 2013 by Luca Ferrari, Matteo Danieli, and Francesco Patarnello — childhood friends who pivoted from a failed mobile app called Evertale to building an operating company with the $40,000 they had left, according to the company's IPO prospectus. The firm now owns a portfolio that includes AOL, Vimeo, Eventbrite, and Evernote, all acquired before its public debut.
The company has moved further into enterprise software in recent months. In August, it announced the acquisition of workflow platform Airtable for approximately $1.3 billion — a price representing nearly 90% below Airtable's peak valuation from late 2021. Last month, Bending Spoons agreed to buy collaboration software vendor Miro, once valued at $17.5 billion, for $1.36 billion.
The deals reflect a broader dislocation in the software market. Shares of Intuit, HubSpot, and Adobe are all down at least 30% this year, as businesses redirect spending toward AI platforms like Anthropic and OpenAI. The phenomenon has drawn its own label in technology circles: the "SaaSpocalypse."
Nick Mehta, former CEO of cloud software vendor Gainsight, said private equity firms that might have pursued similar targets are now constrained by earlier, higher-priced bets. "They paid much higher prices and have so many troubled companies that it's difficult for them to take swings now," Mehta said. He noted that "Bending Spooned" has become a verb in Silicon Valley, describing companies acquired for pennies on the dollar.
Bending Spoons' approach differs from traditional private equity in a key respect: the company is not seeking eventual exits. Instead, it aims to generate sustained profits from its acquisitions — a model it describes as inspired by Berkshire Hathaway — while taking a direct hand in product, operations, and staffing decisions.
That hands-on posture comes with layoffs. Bending Spoons said Monday that a "large portion of the pre-acquisition team" from Airtable would be leaving with "substantial separation packages." Similar cuts have followed acquisitions at Evernote, Vimeo, WeTransfer, and others in the portfolio.
Lloyd Walmsley, an analyst at Mizuho, said the company's operating approach sets it apart. "It's not typical of traditional private equity firms to make anywhere near this level of change," Walmsley said.
Bending Spoons told CNBC in a statement that it had not been outbid for an acquisition target in "several years," signaling that competition for the class of distressed SaaS assets it pursues remains limited.
Ethan Kurzweil, founder and managing partner at Chemistry VC, said the problem facing many of these software companies is not quality but relevance. "They're not on the frontier anymore," he said.
Whether Bending Spoons can extract durable value from a portfolio of pre-AI software products — at the pace and scale it is now acquiring them — will be the central question as the company moves deeper into its post-IPO chapter.
Sara Montes de Oca is the Editor in Chief of TechEchelon. Previously a correspondent and producer in Washington, D.C., covering business, finance, and politics.
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