Bending Spoons wants to revive software castoffs. Berkshire investing

At the time of its Nasdaq debut in July, Bending Spoons was a little-known holding company out of Italy that owned older internet names like AOL, Vimeo, Eventbrite and Evernote.

Less than four months later, the Milan-based firm has emerged as a surprising home for former high-flying software startups that have been thrust aside by the artificial intelligence boom. Its M&A plan got a major boost this week from the most famous holding company on the planet: Berkshire Hathaway.

Berkshire, which Bending Spoons describes as a “longstanding inspiration” for its strategy, has now invested over $900 million in the company, including a $330 million stake disclosed on Wednesday. Wall Street loved the deal, sending Bending Spoons’ stock up 41%, though some of those gains were lost later in the week, leaving the company with a market cap of about $30 billion.

“Berkshire’s decision to add to its position just a few months after the IPO and at these levels provides another vote of confidence in the Bending Spoons model from one of the world’s most respected long-term investors,” wrote analysts at Mizuho, in a report after the announcement.

The other big news out of Bending Spoons this week underscores the flipside of the business: job cuts. In August, Bending Spoons announced it was buying workflow software provider Airtable for about $1.3 billion, or almost 90% below the company’s peak valuation from late 2021. Bending Spoons said Monday that a “large portion of the pre-acquisition team” from Airtable would be leaving with “substantial separation packages.” Layoffs were previously implemented at Evernote, Vimeo, WeTransfer and others in the portfolio.

For the technology industry, Bending Spoons’ moves represent the latest example of how quickly fortunes are turning in the AI era, as new agents powered by large language models displace software developers and the products they built. With Anthropic and OpenAI marching toward trillion-dollar valuations, businesses are putting more valuable work in their hands at the expense of a host of software-as-a-service names, creating a phenomenon that’s become known as the “SaaSpocalypse.”

Shares of Intuit, HubSpot and Adobe are all down at least 30% this year, and a long list of private SaaS companies that were once venture darlings are now struggling to find capital, with the public market showing no appetite for IPOs. Last month, Bending Spoons agreed to buy collaboration software vendor Miro, once valued at $17.5 billion, for $1.36 billion.

“You’re either like a hot thing or you’re nothing,” said Ethan Kurzweil, founder and managing partner at Chemistry VC and a veteran software investor. Kurzweil said he uses Airtable, and said there are plenty of good SaaS products on the market led by solid teams, “but they’re not on the frontier anymore.”…