Bending Spoons: the Italian company Berkshire Hathaway is betting on

If you have ever sent a large file with WeTransfer, taken notes in Evernote, uploaded a video to Vimeo or bought a ticket on Eventbrite, you have used a product that now belongs to a company based in Milan. It is called Bending Spoons, it was born from a failed startup, it started out with a few tens of thousands of dollars and in July 2026 it listed on the Nasdaq. In October the holding company Berkshire Hathaway decided to increase its bet. But have you ever wondered what they do and who runs them?

"We are not the second Constellation Software: we are the first Bending Spoons." — Luca Ferrari, to Forbes Italia (December 2025)

A night on Lombok

The story, as the founders themselves tell it in the letter that opens the listing prospectus, begins in the middle of the night on August 2nd 2010, on the island of Lombok, in Indonesia. Francesco Patarnello, Matteo Danieli and Luca Ferrari are three freshly graduated engineers, backpacking to celebrate the end of their studies. They are exhausted but cannot sleep: they have just decided to start a company together.

Two months later Evertale was born, a smartphone app that used artificial intelligence to write the user's diary automatically, from the data on the phone. The three, who according to Forbes Italia had moved to Copenhagen to finish their studies, raised a million dollars, put together a team of ten and launched the product. It did not work. By mid-2013, they write, Evertale had practically no revenue and enough cash for about four months. The company was wound up.

Two things were left from that failure: a lesson and $40,000.

A spoon bent by the mind

The lesson was this: finding a product the market really wants depends heavily on luck, while running a digital business well depends almost entirely on talent and discipline. From there came the idea behind everything that followed: instead of inventing products and hoping they work, buy products that have already found their customers and run them better than the people who built them.

With the $40,000 left over from Evertale, in 2013 Ferrari, Patarnello and Danieli founded a new company in Copenhagen with two colleagues from the old startup, computer scientist Luca Querella and designer Tomasz Greber (who later left). They called it Bending Spoons, a reference to the scene in The Matrix in which a child bends a spoon with his mind. In the prospectus the founders admit they also liked the irony of the name, given that they were setting out to build a world-class company with $40,000, five people and a track record of zero successes out of one attempt.

The first acquisition cost $10,000. Before long the headquarters moved to Milan: the cross-border merger that completed the move was finalised in 2015, and in 2017 the company became an S.p.A. Ferrari has told Forbes Italia that he brought the company back to Italy to show that a globally dominant technology company can be built even in a country that has not seen successes of that kind for decades.

Apps, Immuni and the first real money

In its early years Bending Spoons bought mostly smartphone apps, often small ones. 2017 is the only year in which it closed more than ten acquisitions. In 2018 it bought the video-editing app Splice from GoPro, and in June 2021 Remini, an app that enhances and generates photos with artificial intelligence and would become one of its main products.

In between came 2020, the year the wider Italian public first heard the name Bending Spoons. In April the government chose it to develop Immuni, the national Covid contact-tracing app, released on June 1st 2020 and retired at the end of 2022. The company developed it for free and, to devote resources to it, made no acquisitions that year. The app did not have the hoped-for impact, Ferrari has admitted, but trying was the right choice at a moment of emergency for the country.

Until 2022 Bending Spoons grew by reinvesting the profits of the apps it owned and borrowing from banks. Only in 2022 did it open its capital to outside investors for the first time, raising $340m, as Il Post reported. It was the fuel for the next leap.

Evernote, the first real prey

That leap has a precise name. In November 2022 Bending Spoons announced the purchase of Evernote, the note-taking app that for a short time had been valued at more than a billion dollars. The deal closed in January 2023. According to Ferrari it was the turning point in the company's history: the first time it bought a global brand and an entire company, not just a product, with all the employees who were part of it.

It was also the first time the world saw the Bending Spoons method up close. Within a few months 129 Evernote employees in the United States and Chile were laid off. Free users found themselves limited to 50 notes, where before they could keep hundreds, while subscription prices rose. Many long-time users protested and left. Ferrari defended the choice, explaining that the company systematically tests many combinations of price and features and picks the one that maximises the long-term result: some customers are lost, but those who stay are the ones who care most about the product.

From there the pace picked up. In 2024 came Meetup, StreamYard, Issuu and, above all, WeTransfer, bought in July: in September the company announced it was cutting 75% of the staff. In 2025 it was the turn of the video platform Brightcove, the hiking app komoot and the software Harvest. Then, within a few months, the biggest deals: Vimeo for $1.38bn, AOL, the historic portal founded in 1983 that was one of the giants of the internet in the 1990s, and Eventbrite for about $500m. To fund the campaign, at the end of October 2025 Bending Spoons raised $710m from international investors at an $11bn valuation, a day after announcing a $2.8bn loan package.

The Nasdaq bell

For years Ferrari kept the company away from the stock market, explaining that listing means telling competitors more and living under the pressure of a price that moves every day. At the end of 2025, however, he admitted to Reuters that the company was ready and that any year could be the one.

It was 2026. Bending Spoons priced its shares at $29, above the initial range of $26–28, for a valuation of about $18.4bn. The whole offering was worth $1.68bn, but part of the shares were sold by existing shareholders: according to the second-quarter release, $1.10bn net went into the company's coffers. On July 1st it arrived on the Nasdaq under the symbol BSP and closed its first day at $40.50, almost 40% above the offer price.

Listing did not slow the buying. In August came the agreement for Airtable, the software for organising data and workflows, completed in early September. On September 10th an agreement was announced for Miro, the digital whiteboard that boomed during the pandemic, for $1.355bn of enterprise value, a deal still subject to the required approvals: in 2022, in a private funding round, Miro had been valued at $17.5bn.

Then, on October 14th, the news that went round the papers. Berkshire Hathaway, which had already invested $600m at the time of the listing, agreed to invest another $330m by subscribing to 10 million new shares at $33 each: once the deal is complete, its stake will rise to 4%. Bending Spoons called Berkshire a long-standing source of inspiration, and not by chance: in their letter to investors the founders list among their models the great managers of companies acquired to be held for the long term, from Henry Singleton of Teledyne to Tom Murphy of Capital Cities.

How the machine works

The method, which the founders call the Playbook, has stayed the same since 2013 and has three steps. Buy a digital business with many customers and predictable revenue. Transform it: reorganised teams, rewritten technology, redesigned interfaces, rethought pricing and marketing. Then reinvest the profits in new acquisitions, and the cycle starts again. In thirteen years there have been more than 50 acquisitions, and the company has never sold a significant business.

Those who compare it to a private-equity fund, a fund that buys companies to fix them up and sell them on, are only half right according to Ferrari: Bending Spoons buys like a fund but does not sell, and most of its staff are engineers, designers and artificial-intelligence researchers. His favourite summary is "25% private equity, 75% technology company".

The engine is hiring. In 2025 the company received about 800,000 applications and hired 286 people, roughly one in every 2,800. Ferrari describes working there as playing for Real Madrid: whoever signs is not guaranteed a starting place for ten years. That applies to him too: once a year investors, advisers and senior managers receive a questionnaire with just two questions, "Should we look for another chief executive?" and "Why?". If the yeses pass a certain threshold, the board steps in.

And then there is artificial intelligence, which the founders were already using for Evertale in 2010. According to the prospectus, the share of code changes written wholly or partly by AI went from less than 10% at the start of 2025 to more than 90% at the end of March 2026. According to the company it is one of the reasons it can run products used by hundreds of millions of people with ever leaner teams.

The numbers

The figures show just how fast growth has been. Revenue went from $387m in 2023 to $1.31bn in 2025. In the second quarter of 2026, the first reported as a listed company, it reached $704m, 126% more than in the same period a year earlier, with net income of $177m. For the whole of 2026 the company expects revenue of between $2.78bn and $2.82bn, an estimate that only counts the businesses it owned on August 12th and therefore excludes later acquisitions, starting with Airtable.

The most important detail, though, is another one: organic growth, the growth that does not come from new acquisitions, was 3% in the second quarter. Almost all of the revenue surge comes from the companies bought. And it was largely financed with debt: at the end of June net debt stood at $4.09bn, 2.4 times adjusted EBITDA over the previous twelve months.

The stock

After the debut at $40.50, in mid-July the stock fell to a low of $30.11, just above the IPO price. The Berkshire announcement pushed it to an all-time high of $59.50 on October 15th, before a pullback in the following days. At the close on October 22nd 2026 a share was worth $45.69, for a market value of about $29bn counting both classes of shares.

Source: Yahoo Finance, weekly closing prices. Data as of 23 October 2026.

One peculiarity worth knowing for anyone watching the stock: there are two classes of shares. Those held by the four remaining founders carry five votes each, those bought on the market just one. According to the prospectus, after the listing Ferrari, Patarnello, Danieli and Querella control about 83% of the votes at shareholder meetings. In practice, whoever buys the shares shares in the results but does not decide the company's direction. Bending Spoons has also said it does not plan to pay dividends for the foreseeable future: all available cash goes into new acquisitions.

The doubts to keep in mind

The first concerns growth. With 3% organic growth, the model works as long as there are companies to buy at a good price and money to buy them with. If either runs short, the revenue surge slows.

The second is debt. Ferrari argues that the level of borrowing is prudent, because the portfolio is highly diversified and every business generates cash. The Wall Street Journal, in an analysis picked up by Forbes Italia in September, pointed out instead that some of the loans are expensive (one of $1.8bn carries a 9.4% rate) and that with high interest rates refinancing and making new acquisitions could become costlier.

The third concerns how profits are presented. Bending Spoons gives great prominence to "adjusted" measures, which exclude among other things the amortisation of acquired businesses and restructuring costs: in a model built on acquisitions, these are items that recur every year. The Wall Street Journal questioned in particular the exclusion of amortisation from adjusted profit.

The fourth is reputation. Mass layoffs and price increases have accompanied many acquisitions, from Evernote to WeTransfer. So far revenue has kept growing, but that alone does not tell you whether each acquisition has worked, and the bigger and better known the brands bought, the more every unpopular choice ends up in the spotlight.

The fifth is valuation. According to the Wall Street Journal, in September the market valued Bending Spoons at almost 14 times revenue and more than 100 times net income over the previous twelve months: a price that assumes many years of successful acquisitions.

Bending Spoons is a rare story for Italy: three engineers who started again from a failure with $40,000 and in thirteen years built a group listed in New York worth almost $30bn, with Berkshire Hathaway among its shareholders. But the same formula that brought it this far is the one the market will have to keep rewarding.

Is the method stronger, or the debt heavier?