Berkshire Hathaway has now invested more than $900 million in Bending Spoons, including a $330 million stake disclosed Wednesday, four months after the Italian holding company's Nasdaq debut.
By the numbers: Bending Spoons stock jumped 41% on the Berkshire disclosure before giving back part of the gain, closing Friday at $47.07 against a $29 IPO price and a market cap around $30 billion.
The big picture: The company buys software businesses at a fraction of their boom-era prices. It agreed last month to acquire Miro, once valued at $17.5 billion, for $1.36 billion, and in August bought Airtable for about $1.3 billion, almost 90% below Airtable's late-2021 peak valuation.
- Mizuho analysts wrote that Berkshire adding to its position a few months after the IPO and at these levels is "another vote of confidence in the Bending Spoons model from one of the world's most respected long-term investors."
Yes, but: The model runs on cost cuts. Bending Spoons said Monday that a large portion of the pre-acquisition Airtable team would leave with substantial separation packages, following layoffs at Evernote, Vimeo and WeTransfer.
The backstory: Three friends founded Bending Spoons in 2013 after a mobile app called Evertale failed, using the $40,000 they had left to build an operating company. It acquired Evernote in 2022, Brightcove in 2024, then Vimeo, AOL and Eventbrite in 2025, and raised about $1.7 billion in its June 30 IPO.
- Intuit, HubSpot and Adobe shares are all down at least 30% this year as AI agents displace the software they sell.
Why it matters: "You're either like a hot thing or you're nothing," said Chemistry VC founder Ethan Kurzweil. A generation of software companies once worth tens of billions is being rolled up for single-digit billions, and Berkshire is now funding the roll-up.
