Berkshire Buys $330 Million More of Bending Spoons at $33 a Share, and the Stock Jumps 41%

Berkshire Hathaway is doubling down on a software roll-up that most people had never heard of a year ago.

In a securities filing disclosed Wednesday, Oct. 14, Bending Spoons said it would sell Berkshire 10 million ordinary shares at $33 each in a private placement. That is $330 million. The price was a 13% discount to Tuesday's closing level, according to BigGo Finance's read of the filing. The deal lifts Berkshire's stake to 4%.

Berkshire had already anchored the Milan-based company's July Nasdaq IPO with $600 million. Its total investment is now above $900 million.

The market reaction

Bending Spoons stock closed up about 41% on Wednesday, after trading as much as 54.7% higher during the session. It traded at $53.10 at one point. Some of that gain disappeared by the end of the week, leaving the company with a market value of about $30 billion.

Mizuho analysts called the add-on a "vote of confidence in the Bending Spoons model from one of the world's most respected long-term investors." They also noted that Berkshire bought "just a few months after the IPO and at these levels."

Berkshire's Class A shares rose 1.2% on the news. This is also one of the more visible moves under CEO Greg Abel, who took over from Warren Buffett at the start of 2026. Berkshire put nearly $20 billion into equities in the second quarter after three years of net selling, and it still holds roughly $365 billion in cash, according to BigGo Finance.

What Bending Spoons actually does

Founded in Milan in 2013 by Luca Ferrari and four partners, the company buys aging software and consumer apps and restructures them. Its portfolio includes AOL, Vimeo, Eventbrite, Evernote and WeTransfer. Bending Spoons calls Berkshire a "longstanding inspiration" for its strategy.

It has been buying bigger. In August it agreed to buy Airtable for about $1.3 billion, almost 90% below the workflow software maker's peak valuation from late 2021. Last month it agreed to buy Miro for $1.36 billion. Miro was once valued at $17.5 billion.

The backdrop is a brutal repricing of software. Shares of Intuit, HubSpot and Adobe are each down at least 30% this year. Private software companies that were venture darlings are struggling to raise money, and the public market has shown no appetite for their IPOs. Investors have dubbed the trend the "SaaSpocalypse." AI agents from Anthropic, OpenAI and others are taking over work that software products once did.

"You're either like a hot thing or you're nothing," said Ethan Kurzweil, managing partner at Chemistry VC. He said he uses Airtable and that plenty of SaaS products are run by solid teams, "but they're not on the frontier anymore."

The cost side

The model comes with layoffs. On Monday, Oct. 12, Bending Spoons said a "large portion of the pre-acquisition team" at Airtable would leave with "substantial separation packages." Layoffs were previously carried out at Evernote, Vimeo, WeTransfer and others in the portfolio.

That is how the model produces cash. It buys a product with a big user base, strips cost out and uses the cash flow to fund the next purchase. Workers at the targets bear the cost. Bending Spoons is offering separation packages in the Airtable case and has not said how many jobs are affected.

The financial risks

The numbers show a company growing fast and not yet earning much. Revenue nearly doubled in each of the past two years to $1.3 billion in 2025, while net income fell to breakeven amid acquisition costs, according to BigGo Finance.

Simply Wall St's analysis flagged two pressure points. One is dilution from the new shares. The other is that analysts have flagged interest payments as not well covered by earnings. Its analysts said the Berkshire check can "read like a vote of confidence or a fresh source of balance sheet strain," depending on the reader. It put its own fair value estimate at $48.27, below the $53.10 level reached Wednesday.

The Berkshire money is equity, not debt. That helps with the leverage concern, but it does not change how the acquired businesses must perform. If Bending Spoons keeps buying before assets like Vimeo and WeTransfer are fully squeezed for cash, the interest-coverage question gets harder, in Simply Wall St's framing.

What is next

No one has announced what the $330 million will buy. Whether Bending Spoons can keep acquiring at this pace, including Airtable and Miro, and show earnings that cover its interest costs remains unresolved. The stock's gain is already being tested, since part of Wednesday's 41% jump was gone by the end of the week.