Berkshire Hathaway has increased its stake in Bending Spoons to over $900 million, with a $330 million investment disclosed Wednesday that pushed the Milan-based software consolidator's market capitalization to approximately $30 billion following a 41 percent stock surge.
Bending Spoons' strategy targets distressed SaaS companies—Airtable, Miro, Vimeo, Eventbrite, Evernote, and AOL among them—acquired at valuations far below their peaks. The company bought Airtable in August for $1.3 billion, nearly 90 percent below its late-2021 high. Miro, once valued at $17.5 billion, sold for $1.36 billion last month.
The acquisitions have included significant workforce reductions. Bending Spoons announced Monday that a large portion of Airtable's staff would depart with separation packages. Similar layoffs followed at Evernote, Vimeo, and WeTransfer.
The SaaS sector faces structural headwinds. Public software firms like Intuit, HubSpot, and Adobe have declined at least 30 percent this year. Private SaaS companies—once venture capital staples—struggle to raise capital as the public market shuns new software IPOs.
Ethan Kurzweil, founder at Chemistry VC and a veteran software investor, described the market split: many quality SaaS products with strong teams exist but no longer occupy the industry's frontier as AI labs like Anthropic and OpenAI command investor attention and capital.
Bending Spoons, founded in 2013 by Luca Ferrari, Matteo Danieli, and Francesco Patarnello, initially developed a mobile app called Evertale that failed to gain traction. The company went public on Nasdaq in July.
