Bending Spoons wants to bring back software castoffs. Investing in Berkshire

When listed on Nasdaq in July, bendable spoon is a little-known Italian holding company that owned old internet names like AOL, Vimeo, Eventbrite, and Evernote.

Less than four months later, the Milan-based company has emerged as a surprising home for once-high-profile software startups that have been pushed aside by the artificial intelligence boom. The company’s M&A plans received a major boost this week by the most famous holding company on the planet. Berkshire Hathaway.

Berkshire, which Vending Spoons says is a “long-time inspiration” for the strategy, now has more than $900 million invested in the company, including a $330 million stake disclosed Wednesday. Wall Street cheered the deal, sending Vending Spoons’ stock price up 41%, but some of that gain was lost in the second half of the week, giving the company a market capitalization of about $30 billion.

“Berkshire’s decision to add to a position at this level just months after its IPO represents renewed confidence in the bending spoons model from one of the world’s most respected long-term investors,” Mizuho analysts said in a post-announcement report.

The other big news from Bending Spoons this week highlights the other side of the business: layoffs. In August, Vending Spoons announced it would acquire workflow software provider Airtable for approximately $1.3 billion. This is almost 90% below the company’s highest valuation from late 2021. Bending Spoons said on Monday that “the majority of the pre-acquisition team” from Air Table will be leaving with a “substantive separation package”. Job cuts were previously implemented at Evernote, Vimeo, WeTransfer, and others in the portfolio.

For the tech industry, Bending Spoons’ move represents the latest example of how rapidly fortunes are changing in the AI ​​era, as new agents leveraging large-scale language models replace software developers and the products they build. and human and OpenAI With valuations reaching trillions of dollars, companies are sacrificing many Software-as-a-Service names to take more valuable work into their own hands, creating a phenomenon known as the “SaaSpocalypse.”

shares of intuition, hubspot and adobe have all fallen at least 30% this year, a number of private SaaS companies that were once venture darlings are now struggling to raise capital, and public markets are showing no appetite for IPOs. Last month, Bending Spoons agreed to acquire Miro, a collaboration software vendor previously valued at $17.5 billion, for $1.36 billion.

“You’re either popular or you’re nobody,” said Ethan Kurzweil, founder and managing partner of Chemistry VC and a veteran software investor. Kurzweil, who uses Airtable, said there are a lot of good SaaS products on the market led by solid teams, but “they’re not the frontier anymore.”

Bending Spoons was founded in 2013 by friends Luca Ferrari, CEO Matteo Danieli and Francesco Patarnello. A mobile app they created called Evertale failed to catch on, and they used the remaining $40,000 to create a company to replace the “product no one wanted,” according to their IPO prospectus.

Bending Spoons announced all of the biggest deals of the past few years, starting with Evernote in 2022, followed by Brightcove in 2024, Vimeo, AOL, and Eventbrite in 2025.

The company held an IPO on June 30th, raising approximately $1.7 billion at $29 per share, and listed on the Nasdaq the next day. The stock’s closing price on Friday was $47.07.

Before Bending Spoons’ recent foray into enterprise software, major acquisitions in the space over the past decade included private equity giants Thoma Bravo and Vista Equity Partners. These companies sought to acquire SaaS companies they deemed undervalued and, through a combination of cost reductions, efficiency improvements, and rollups, turn them into assets that could be sold or taken public at higher prices.

Bending Spoons uses a different playbook. The company is not seeking an eventual exit, but instead wants to generate profits from the acquired businesses, similar to Warren Buffett’s model. But unlike Berkshire, Bending Spoons is technology-focused and takes a hands-on approach to its proprietary software, operations, and personnel decisions.

Nick Mehta, former CEO of cloud software vendor Gainsight, said the current restrictions on private equity firms were due to a “nosebleed”.

“They paid a much higher price and there are so many troubled companies out there that it’s hard to pick one up now,” said Mehta, who sold Gainsight to Vista in 2020.

Thomas Bravo and Vista did not respond to requests for interviews. Vending Spoons told CNBC in a statement that it had not received an outbid over the stocks in “recent years.”

Mehta said that once the company started moving into SaaS, the phrase “bending the spoon,” which refers to a company being scooped up for $1, became a verb in Silicon Valley.

“Unfortunately, a lot of my friends who are in that game are stuck,” Mehta said. “Investors want to exit, but there are no buyers. What was before ChatGPT is now a legacy.”

Mizuho analyst Lloyd Walmsley said Vending Spoons’ model differs from traditional acquisition approaches.

“I don’t think there are many people who are doing what they do in terms of the depth of their work and their willingness to make significant changes to the product,” Walmsley said in an interview. “Making this level of change is not typical of traditional private equity firms.”

Customers of companies acquired by Bending Spoons may experience sudden price increases.

In April 2023, a few months after the Evernote acquisition, Bending Spoons increased its annual subscription price for individuals from $70 to $130. The company has since changed its offering, with the Pro plan costing $170, compared to $100 for the so-called Starter plan and $250 for Evernote Advanced.

“My first reaction was, oh, looks like I need to switch to OneNote,” Walmsley says. Microsoft’s Memo app. But he said he continued using Evernote.

“They’re very good at finding things that offer a lot of value, but the switching costs are very high,” Walmsley said. “The price is not that high compared to the switching costs.”

Ferrari said in an interview with CNBC on Thursday that Vending Spoons is leveraging profits from its portfolio companies for future growth, the “overwhelming majority” of which will come from making more deals.

“There are certainly opportunities for improvement that we can exploit in the first few years, and then the business will have organic growth inherent in that market,” Ferrari said.

For Berkshire and its fellow Bending Spoons investors, that bet remains unproven.

With AI squeezing margins in many software sectors, products must remain attractive enough for customers to be willing to pay for them. In its first earnings report as a public company in August, Vending Spoons said revenue more than doubled from a year earlier to more than $700 million, with almost all of the growth coming from acquisitions, and net income rose 171% to $177 million.

That was before the Airtable deal was finalized, and Miro hadn’t been announced yet. In the coming quarters and years, Wall Street will get a clearer picture of whether the company’s structure can revive the software.

During the company’s August earnings call, analysts asked whether Airtable signaled a long-term shift in M&A strategy to enterprise.

Ferrari said about half of Bending Spoons’ revenue already comes from its professional business, primarily through Brightcove and Vimeo, which has an enterprise component. The company’s recent focus on software has to do with where it finds value after a significant stock price decline, he said.

“Most enterprise SaaS businesses were valued at unreasonably high standards until recently,” Ferrari said. “I never thought that price made sense.”

—CNBC’s Ari Levy contributed to this report.