While AI labs chase trillion-dollar valuations, a Milan holding company is buying what they leave behind. Bending Spoons collected a further $330M from Berkshire Hathaway this week, a stake disclosed on Wednesday that lifted its stock 41 percent before gains faded. Berkshire’s total position now exceeds $900M.
The strategy is unglamorous and effective. Bending Spoons owns AOL, Vimeo, Eventbrite and Evernote, and it keeps shopping. In August it agreed to buy Airtable for $1.3B, roughly 90 percent below that company’s 2021 peak, and last month it moved for Miro at $1.36B from a $17.5B valuation.
Each deal follows a pattern: acquire, centralize operations, cut a large share of staff, run the product for cash. On Monday the company said much of Airtable’s pre-acquisition team would leave with separation packages.
The market it exploits is real. Intuit, HubSpot and Adobe have each lost at least 30 percent this year as agents absorb knowledge work, with Anthropic and OpenAI moving into the workflow layer. Private software companies once seen as IPO candidates now struggle to raise at all.
Berkshire’s check reads as a bet that durable distribution and cost discipline beat hype, and that the wreckage of the SaaS era is cheap enough to make a portfolio out of.
