Berkshire Hathaway has made another bet, and the share price of this Italian company has surged by 41%
Tech M&A giant Bending Spoons has once secured heavyweight backing from Berkshire Hathaway, the conglomerate controlled by the "Oracle of Omaha" Warren Buffett.
Additional $330 Million Investment Pushes Stake to 4%
According to the latest disclosure, Berkshire Hathaway made an additional $330 million investment in Bending Spoons via private placement, bringing its total cumulative investment to $930 million when adding the $600 million direct bet made at the time of IPO. After the transaction is completed, Berkshire's shareholding in the company has risen to 4%.
Driven by this strong positive catalyst, Bending Spoons' share price skyrocketed by more than 41% in a single trading day, hitting a record high since its listing, with a closing total market value of nearly $34 billion.
What Kind of Company Is Bending Spoons?
Bending Spoons is a technology company headquartered in Milan, Italy, founded in 2013. Its core business is not a single internet product, but acquiring and operating mature digital products and software enterprises.
Its model is completely different from the traditional private equity "acquire-exit" logic: it specifically purchases digital applications that used to be popular but have lost growth momentum, restructures the cost structure through large-scale layoffs, AI-powered code rewriting, and adjustment of pricing and business models to turn them into stable cash flow generators, and then reinvests the profits into the next acquisition.
Its asset list includes a number of well-known legacy internet brands: AOL, Vimeo, Evernote, Eventbrite, as well as Airtable, WeTransfer, Brightcove, Tractive and others. According to the prospectus, the company has completed more than 50 acquisitions and locked in over 1,000 potential acquisition targets across Europe and North America.
Take Evernote as an example. This note-taking software once had more than 100 million global users, but gradually fell behind after its market share was eroded by new tools such as Notion and Microsoft OneNote. In 2022, Bending Spoons took over the company for about $200 million, immediately laid off teams in the United States and Chile, moved operations to Europe, rewrote the underlying code with AI tools, launched 250 major improvements within two and a half years, and significantly raised subscription prices — a complete streamlined playbook of "acquisition, layoff, price hike, reinvestment".
Entering 2026, the company's aggressive acquisition spree has not slowed down. According to incomplete statistics, the company has acquired legacy internet business AOL, event and ticketing platform Eventbrite, pet health app Tractive, and workflow application Airtable (the deal was closed on September 4) this year, and announced on September 10 that it would acquire online collaborative whiteboard application Miro at an enterprise value of $1.355 billion, with the deal still pending closing.
Ferrari said at the Financial Times and Latham & Watkins Private Capital Summit held in London last week: "We allocate capital in a way that maximizes earnings per share 10 or 20 years from now. We do not care whether this is achieved through productivity tools, enterprise video infrastructure or dating apps."
The Abel Era: Turning Cash Into Bargaining Chips
Traditionally, Berkshire Hathaway has been cautious about high-valuation, high-burn-rate technology startups, and its tech stock holdings were historically highly concentrated in Apple. However, Berkshire's two consecutive large bets on Bending Spoons reveal its deep recognition of the digital asset integration model.
For the market, the highlights of this transaction go far beyond Bending Spoons itself, and lie in the signal it sends: new CEO Greg Abel is accelerating the conversion of the massive cash on Berkshire's balance sheet into substantial investments.
In the second quarter of this year, Abel invested nearly $20 billion in the stock market, ending Berkshire's three-year net selling streak. Earlier this year, he also participated in the $10 billion private placement of Alphabet, Google's parent company, and added approximately $17 billion of Alphabet holdings in the second quarter.
At present, Berkshire still holds about $365 billion in cash on its books. The market is closely watching at what pace and in which directions this huge "ammunition" will be deployed.
Berkshire's two consecutive stake increases in Bending Spoons — from $600 million at IPO to the latest $330 million — is regarded as a clear footnote for its bet on software asset packages: instead of betting on a single product, Berkshire now prefers to acquire a full "software acquisition machine" that comes with built-in cash flow, refined operation capabilities, and the ability to continuously reinvest in itself.
This article is from the WeChat Official Account "Gelonghui Finance Hotspot" (ID: glh_finance), written by Bai Yeju, published with authorization from 36Kr.