Berkshire Doubles Down on Bending Spoons With Another $330 Million, Sending BSP Up 41%
Berkshire Hathaway agreed on Wednesday to invest a further $330 million in Bending Spoons, the Milan-based technology company behind AOL, Vimeo and Evernote. The deal is a private placement: 10 million ordinary shares at $33.00 each, roughly 13% below Tuesday's $37.86 close. Combined with the $600 million Berkshire put in at the July IPO, the total commitment rises to $930 million and its ownership to 4%. The shares are unregistered under the Securities Act of 1933; closing is subject to customary conditions and expected in the fourth quarter, with further detail in a Form 6-K filed with the SEC.
On Wednesday it opened at $50.29, traded between $49.21 and $58.56, and closed at $53.46 — up $15.60, or 41.2%. Reuters logged a 34% intraday rally; Yahoo Finance recorded as much as 54%. Before the announcement, BSP had slipped about 6.5% since its July 1 debut. Berkshire bought at a discount, and by Wednesday's intraday prices that purchase was already up more than 55%.
Bending Spoons was founded in Milan in 2013 by CEO Luca Ferrari and four co-founders, after their first startup failed and left them with roughly $40,000. It listed on the Nasdaq Global Select Market on July 1 under the ticker BSP, pricing at $29 per share, raising $1.68 billion at an implied $18.4 billion valuation — one of Europe's largest listings since 2023. The stock closed its first session at $40.50. Its portfolio includes AOL, Vimeo, Evernote, WeTransfer, Eventbrite, Brightcove, Tractive, plus the recently acquired Airtable and Miro.
The company's stated playbook: acquire digital businesses, transform them deeply — reorganizing teams, overhauling technology, redesigning interfaces, accelerating development and sharpening monetization — and reinvest the earnings into the next acquisition. It has run this strategy for more than a decade and is widely described as tech's most aggressive buyer. In September it closed the $1.285 billion acquisition of Airtable, then agreed to buy collaboration platform Miro for about $1.36 billion in cash. Miro brought roughly $600 million in annual recurring revenue and nearly 4 million paying users, about 90% of it from business and enterprise accounts.
CEO and co-founder Luca Ferrari called Berkshire "among the finest and most respected capital allocators in the world" and a longstanding inspiration. Co-founder and head of business acquisitions Francesco Patarnello said Bending Spoons "continuously evaluates M&A opportunities" with a pipeline that "remains strong," and that the investment would enhance its financial flexibility. Proceeds are earmarked for general corporate purposes and new deals. Berkshire did not immediately comment.
To part-fund the Miro deal, Bending Spoons finished syndicating add-ons to its senior secured term loan B in September: $1.25 billion in dollars and €395 million, both upsized, maturing in 2031. Moody's and S&P upgraded it to Ba3 and BB- respectively. On the agencies' pro forma numbers, revenue reaches about $3.9 billion–$4 billion with adjusted EBITDA near $1.3 billion and leverage around 4.7x. Subscriptions account for roughly 80% of revenue.
The operating numbers give the bulls ammunition: second-quarter 2026 revenue of $704.2 million, up 126% year over year, and earnings per share of $0.46 against an estimate of $0.27, on a gross margin reported near 66.8%.
The money is being deployed by Greg Abel, who took over as chief executive from Warren Buffett at the start of the year. Buffett stepped down as chairman on September 18, handing the role to his son Howard while becoming chairman emeritus. Abel is reshaping the portfolio: it added about $17 billion of Alphabet stock in the second quarter, making Google's parent its third-largest common stock holding. Berkshire held $365.5 billion in cash and short-term Treasuries at the end of June and bought back about $4.5 billion of its own stock in the second quarter.
At least one US financial outlet made the obvious point: Bending Spoons is a company much like Berkshire — a decentralized acquisition machine that buys cash-generative businesses, improves them, and funnels the profits into the next deal. That similarity is why the market read the top-up as a strong endorsement, timed after the IPO glow had faded and the shares had drifted lower.
Mizuho reiterated an Outperform rating and a $72 price target, crediting effective capital deployment. BofA Securities cut its target to $36 from $39 and kept an Underperform rating, flagging AI risk and competition from agent products such as Meta's Muse. Valuation remains the crux: the company's market value is around $40 billion, or nearly 10 times forward sales on an enterprise-value basis and about 30 times projected 2027 earnings.
Three things to track: whether the placement closes in the fourth quarter on customary terms; the Miro deal's regulatory clearances, also expected in the fourth quarter; and the terms in Berkshire's Form 6-K, plus the next acquisition the market expects. For Bending Spoons, a Berkshire stake that cost nearly $1 billion is both capital and a credit reference — the kind that helps a collector of faded brands borrow cheaply in the next bidding round.