How an Italian Tech Holding Company Became the Unlikely Savior of Former High-Flying Software Startups

At the time of its initial public offering on the Nasdaq in July, Bending Spoons was largely a little-known holding company hailing from Italy, managing a portfolio of older and established internet names such as AOL, Vimeo, Eventbrite, and Evernote. Less than four months later, the Milan-based firm has emerged as a surprising and powerful sanctuary for former high-flying software startups that have been thrust aside and battered by the ongoing artificial intelligence boom. Its aggressive mergers and acquisitions strategy received a massive and unexpected endorsement this week from the most famous holding company on the planet: Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway.

Berkshire, which Bending Spoons describes as a longstanding inspiration for its unique corporate strategy, has now poured over $900 million into the company. This includes a newly disclosed $330 million stake revealed on Wednesday. Wall Street warmly embraced the deal, sending Bending Spoons’ stock soaring by 41%, though some of those gains moderated later in the week, leaving the company with a robust market capitalization of approximately $30 billion.

Financial analysts quickly weighed in on the heavyweight backing. In a research report published shortly after the announcement, analysts at Mizuho wrote that Berkshire’s decision to increase its position just a few months after the public debut—and at current market levels—provides yet another strong vote of confidence in the Bending Spoons operational model from one of the world’s most respected long-term investors.

However, the other major headline emerging from Bending Spoons this week underscores the difficult flipside of its business model: deep job cuts. In August, Bending Spoons announced it was acquiring workflow software provider Airtable for roughly $1.3 billion, a valuation representing nearly a 90% discount from the company’s peak valuation achieved in late 2021. Bending Spoons announced that a large portion of the pre-acquisition team from Airtable would be departing the company equipped with substantial separation packages. Similar rounds of layoffs were previously implemented across other acquired portfolio mainstays, including Evernote, Vimeo, and WeTransfer.

For the broader technology industry, these sweeping moves by Bending Spoons represent the latest striking example of how quickly fortunes are turning in the modern AI era. As advanced agents powered by large language models rapidly displace traditional software developers and the software products they built, the market landscape is shifting dramatically. With market leaders like Anthropic and OpenAI steadily marching toward trillion-dollar valuations, modern businesses are increasingly placing valuable day-to-day work into the hands of these intelligent models at the direct expense of a host of software-as-a-service names. This widespread market phenomenon has quickly become known across the industry as the "SaaSpocalypse."

As a result of this seismic shift, shares of established software giants such as Intuit, HubSpot, and Adobe have all declined by at least 30% over the course of the year. Furthermore, a long list of private SaaS companies that were once considered venture capital darlings are now struggling to secure fresh capital, while the public market shows virtually zero appetite for new technology initial public offerings. Highlighting this distressed environment, Bending Spoons agreed last month to acquire collaboration software vendor Miro—a company once valued at a staggering $17.5 billion—for just $1.36 billion.

Ethan Kurzweil, the founder and managing partner at Chemistry VC and a veteran software investor, highlighted the unforgiving nature of the current market climate. "You’re either like a hot thing or you’re nothing," Kurzweil said. He noted that he personally uses Airtable and recognizes that there are still plenty of high-quality SaaS products on the market led by exceptionally solid teams, but added that "they’re not on the frontier anymore."

An App Turned Acquirer

Bending Spoons was originally launched back in 2013 by a trio of friends: Luca Ferrari, who serves as the chief executive officer, alongside Matteo Danieli and Francesco Patarnello. Their early trajectory was far from a guaranteed success; a mobile application they had created called Evertale failed to take off with consumers. Rather than persisting with a failing product, they decided to take the remaining $40,000 they had left and build an operating company instead of pursuing "products nobody wanted," as detailed in the company’s IPO prospectus.

Over the subsequent decade, Bending Spoons gradually built its operational foundation before accelerating its acquisition pace dramatically in recent years. The company’s acquisition spree began with Evernote in 2022, followed by Brightcove in 2024, and continued aggressively with Vimeo, AOL, and Eventbrite through 2025.

Following this steady portfolio expansion, the company officially held its initial public offering on June 30, successfully raising approximately $1.7 billion by pricing its shares at $29 apiece before making its formal trading debut on the Nasdaq the very next day. The stock closed out the trading week at $47.07 per share.

Prior to Bending Spoons’ recent aggressive push into enterprise software, some of the most prominent acquirers in the technology space over the past decade were private equity behemoths such as Thoma Bravo and Vista Equity Partners. Those traditional private equity firms typically aimed to buy what they perceived as undervalued SaaS companies and, through a disciplined combination of cost cuts, operational efficiency improvements, and rollups, transform them into streamlined assets that could eventually be sold or taken public at a significantly higher valuation.

Bending Spoons, however, is utilizing a markedly different playbook. The company is generally not looking for eventual corporate exits or quick flips; instead, it aims to generate long-term compounding profits directly from the businesses it acquires, operating much like the legendary Warren Buffett investment model. But unlike Berkshire Hathaway’s diversified conglomerate approach, Bending Spoons’ core focus remains firmly rooted in technology, and it takes an exceptionally hands-on, granular approach to managing its software assets, internal operations, and personnel decisions.

Nick Mehta, the former CEO of cloud software vendor Gainsight, pointed out that traditional private equity firms are currently severely limited in their capabilities because "they got their nose bloodied."

"They paid much higher prices and have so many troubled companies that it’s difficult for them to take swings now," explained Mehta, who successfully sold Gainsight to Vista in 2020.

While representatives for Thoma Bravo and Vista did not respond to requests for interviews, Bending Spoons confirmed to CNBC in a statement that it has not been outbid for a targeted acquisition target in "several years."

As the company continued its aggressive march into the SaaS sector, Mehta noted that "Bending Spooned" has actually transformed into a popular verb in Silicon Valley, shorthand used to describe once-proud software companies getting scooped up for pennies on the dollar.

"Unfortunately, a lot of my friends in that game are stuck," Mehta said. "Investors want out, but there are no buyers. Anything pre-ChatGPT is legacy now."

Lloyd Walmsley, an equity analyst at Mizuho, emphasized that Bending Spoons’ operational model stands in stark contrast to traditional buyout strategies.

"I think there aren’t a lot of people that do what these guys do in terms of the depth of operations and the willingness to make substantial product changes," Walmsley said in an interview. "It’s not typical of traditional private equity firms to make anywhere near this level of change."

For the everyday customers of the various software companies that Bending Spoons acquires, these operational overhauls often translate into sudden and substantial price hikes.

In April 2023, just months after finalizing its acquisition of Evernote, Bending Spoons sharply lifted the annual personal subscription price from $70 to $130. Later on, the company restructured its entire pricing tier, charging $100 for its basic starter plan and $250 for "Evernote Advanced," a notable increase compared to the $170 it had previously been charging for its standard pro plan.

"My first reaction was like, Oh man, I guess I have to switch to OneNote," Walmsley recalled, referring to Microsoft’s competing notetaking application. Ultimately, however, he admitted that he stuck with Evernote despite the higher costs.

"They’re really savvy at finding these things that they provide a lot of value, and the switching costs are really high," Walmsley noted. "The price isn’t that high relative to the switching cost."

Bending Spoons routinely channels the generated profits from its existing portfolio companies to fuel future corporate growth. The overwhelming majority of that expansion stems directly from executing more strategic deals, CEO Luca Ferrari explained in an interview.

"There are certain opportunities for improvement we can unlock over the first few years, and then the business will have whatever organic growth is intrinsic in that market," Ferrari said.

For Berkshire Hathaway and the rest of Bending Spoons’ investor base, the ultimate long-term bet remains unproven.

The underlying software products must continue to remain desirable enough that corporate and individual customers are willing to keep paying higher prices at a time when artificial intelligence is actively squeezing profit margins across vast swathes of the broader software sector. In its very first quarterly earnings report as a publicly traded company in August, Bending Spoons reported that its total revenue had more than doubled compared to the previous year, surpassing $700 million. This rapid expansion was driven almost entirely by recent acquisitions, while net income climbed 171% to hit $177 million.

That impressive financial milestone was achieved before the Airtable transaction had officially closed and well before the acquisition of Miro had even been announced. Over the coming quarters and years, Wall Street will gain a much clearer picture of whether the firm’s unconventional corporate structure can genuinely revive and sustain mature software assets.

During the company’s earnings call in August, an analyst directly questioned whether the Airtable deal represented a permanent, long-term shift in Bending Spoons’ mergers and acquisitions strategy toward the enterprise market.

Ferrari responded by noting that roughly half of Bending Spoons’ total revenue already originates from professional businesses, largely channeled through Brightcove and Vimeo, both of which maintain robust enterprise components. He explained that the recent heavy concentration on software deals has far more to do with identifying where true market value resides following a severe and widespread sector selloff.

"Most enterprise SaaS businesses were valued at irrationally high levels until somewhat recently," Ferrari said. "We never saw those prices making any sense."