Berkshire increases investment by $330 million, this "APP Renovation Factory" sees its stock price soar over 40% in a single day

An Italian company that started out by acquiring “outdated software” is becoming one of the most eye-catching bets for Berkshire Hathaway in the post-Buffett era.

According to a report by the Financial Times on the 14th, Berkshire Hathaway has made another move, injecting an additional $330 million investment into Italian tech M&A firm Bending Spoons. After the news was made public, Bending Spoons’ share price soared over 41% in a single day. This marks Berkshire's second investment in the company since participating in its IPO in July this year with an injection of $600 million, raising its stake to 4%.

This investment was carried out via a directed share issue, with Bending Spoons issuing 10 million common shares to Berkshire at a price of $33 per share. As of Wednesday’s close, Bending Spoons' share price had surged nearly 84% from its first trading day, and its market capitalization reached $34 billion. Intra-day, the maximum increase reached 54.7%. Berkshire Hathaway Class A shares rose simultaneously by 1.2% that day.

This transaction is also the latest signal of accelerated capital deployment since new CEO Greg Abel took charge at Berkshire. In the second quarter of this year, Abel invested nearly $20 billion into the stock market, ending a three-year net selling streak. Berkshire currently holds as much as $365 billion in cash on hand, and the market is closely watching how Abel will transform this into substantial investments.

“App Refurbishment Factory”: Acquisition, Layoffs, Price Increases, and Reinvestment

Bending Spoons was co-founded by Luca Ferrari and four others in 2013, and is headquartered in Milan. The company’s business logic is: to specifically acquire digital apps that were once popular but have since lost growth momentum, reconstruct cost structures through large-scale layoffs, AI code rewrites, adjusted pricing and business models, and turn them into stable cash flow, then reinvest the profits into the next acquisition.

Its asset list includes once-prominent internet star products such as AOL, Vimeo, Evernote, and Eventbrite. According to its prospectus, the company has completed over 50 acquisitions and has identified more than 1,000 potential acquisition targets across Europe and North America.

Speaking at the Private Capital Summit co-hosted by the Financial Times and Latham & Watkins last week in London, Ferrari stated: “We allocate capital in a way that maximizes per-share earnings 10 or 20 years from now. Whether it’s through productivity tools, enterprise video infrastructure, or dating apps, we don’t mind.”

He also remarked: “We have long believed that this company could someday be worth hundreds of billions of dollars.”

Three Examples: How to Turn “Outdated Products” into Cash Flow Machines

Evernote was once a note-taking software with over 100 million users globally but lagged behind as new tools like Notion and Microsoft OneNote gained traction. In 2022, Bending Spoons acquired it for roughly $200 million before immediately laying off teams in the United States and Chile, shifting operations to Europe, and using AI tools to rewrite the underlying code. Within two and a half years, they launched 250 major improvements and significantly raised subscription prices. According to the prospectus, Evernote’s average monthly net income from mobile increased from $1.5 million in the six months before the acquisition to $2.1 million in the most recent six months.

Vimeo was spun off from IAC and listed in 2021, with its share price once peaking at $57, but it languished in the wake of the short video boom. In September 2025, Bending Spoons acquired it for $1.38 billion, cutting the consumer business and transforming it into an enterprise video service driven by AI-based B2B infrastructure.

AOL was once an internet giant worth over $100 billion, but after the dial-up era ended, it changed hands several times and became a marginal asset. Bending Spoons discovered it still had around 8 million daily active users and over $500 million in annual revenue. In October 2025, it completed a $1.5 billion acquisition and used AI automation to take over backend operations, converting this income into a stable cash flow with almost zero marketing costs.

Financial Data: Revenue Doubles for Two Consecutive Years, Capital Markets Buy In

According to its prospectus, Bending Spoons’ revenues for 2023 to 2025 were $387 million, $671 million, and $1.3 billion, nearly doubling for two consecutive years; gross profit for the same period grew from $236 million to $857 million.

Due to large-scale acquisitions and related costs in 2025, net profit fell back from $89 million in the previous year to near break-even, but this did not diminish market confidence in its model. Wall Street views it as a new technology company paradigm—not relying on continuously creating new products, but achieving growth by operating existing software assets over the long term.

This approach is somewhat similar to Canadian software giant Constellation Software, though with a different path: Constellation focuses on B2B vertical industry software and uses decentralized management, while Bending Spoons applies a similar M&A strategy to consumer applications and substitutes traditional human integration with a highly integrated AI technical platform. Ferrari once stated that over 90% of the company’s code commits are written or contributed to by AI.

Berkshire Endorsement, Mutual Recognition

Francesco Patarnello, co-founder and head of business acquisitions at Bending Spoons, stated: “Bending Spoons continuously evaluates M&A opportunities, and our pipeline remains strong. We believe that Berkshire Hathaway’s investment reflects its confidence in our team and platform, further enhancing our financial flexibility and our ability to pursue high-quality acquisitions within our overall financing strategy.”

Ferrari referred to Berkshire as “one of the world’s most outstanding and respected capital allocators” and described it as the company’s “long-time spiritual role model.” In a statement, he said: “We were delighted to welcome Berkshire Hathaway as a shareholder during our listing, and this additional investment further consolidates our partnership, highlighting mutual respect and a shared outlook for the future.”

However, Bending Spoons continues to face criticism, mainly centered on two points: its routine large-scale layoffs following acquisitions and its limited financial disclosures, which make it difficult for outsiders to independently assess the actual performance of acquired assets.