Berkshire Hathaway is nearly doubling down on one of its rare technology wagers. Bending Spoons, the Milan-based serial acquirer of digital-subscription companies listed as BSP on Nasdaq, announced Wednesday that Berkshire will take 10 million newly issued shares for $33 each in a $330 million private placement.
The market treated the news as an endorsement, and then some. Shares of Bending Spoons closed Wednesday up 41.2% at $53.46, after touching $54.45 earlier in the session — a 44% gain at the peak. The move is striking because the placement itself was priced nearly 13% below Tuesday's $37.86 close: Berkshire bought at a discount, and investors followed it up anyway. The new shares have not yet been registered with the SEC, which bars Berkshire from reselling them until that registration is complete. This is Berkshire's second bet on the company in four months, after a $600 million commitment to its July initial public offering. Under CEO Greg Abel, who took over at the start of 2026 from Warren Buffett, Berkshire has been reshaping its massive equity book — most notably with $17 billion of Alphabet shares added in the second quarter — and the Bending Spoons stake adds a new layer to that push into technology and AI-adjacent businesses.
Why it matters
Follow-on investments from Berkshire carry weight because traders read them as high-conviction signals, not index-level allocation. Bending Spoons runs a compounding playbook that resembles Berkshire's own: buy established businesses, improve their operations, and recycle profits into more acquisitions. Its portfolio includes AOL, Evernote, Vimeo, Eventbrite, Airtable, WeTransfer and Tractive, and it has never sold a material business. Wednesday was a risk-off session for most AI-linked names, with the Nasdaq sliding nearly 2% and bitcoin miners dropping up to 13% as hot US CPI data revived fears of more Fed hikes. In that context, a 41% single-day rally on one placement stands out as pure conviction buying.
That is the number that matters: $930 million committed in four months, from a manager that almost never chases IPOs.
| Placement | Amount | Price per share | Stake after |
|---|---|---|---|
| July IPO commitment | $600M | n/a | foundation stake |
| Oct 14 private placement | $330M | $33 (13% discount to $37.86) | ~4%, 6th-largest holder |
What to watch
- Q3 earnings and the company's $733–745 million revenue guidance (+113% year-on-year at the midpoint), with adjusted operating income guided at $380–400 million.
- The $1.355 billion all-cash Miro acquisition, targeted to close in Q4 2026; Miro carries roughly $600 million of annual recurring revenue, close to nine-tenths of it from business and enterprise clients, and certain Miro shareholders agreed to roll $295 million of proceeds into Bending Spoons.
- How Berkshire deploys the placement proceeds: the company said the funds will finance new acquisitions and general corporate purposes, and co-founder Francesco Patarnello said the M&A pipeline remains strong.
- Regulatory registration of the new shares, which would free Berkshire to sell — the one mechanical overhang on the stock.
MarketRadar take
Wednesday's 41% rally priced in a verdict on the dilution discount almost instantly: the market decided that $33-a-share Berkshire demand was worth more than the 13% placement markdown. That is a short-term sentiment read, not a valuation one. The deeper story is Abel's portfolio shift — $17 billion of Alphabet, a near-billion in a three-month-old software-rollup IPO — which keeps Bending Spoons in the center of Berkshire's tech rotation. With the Q4 Miro close and Q3 results both pending, the stock now has fresh catalysts in both directions; the unregistered-share overhang is the one mechanical risk until the shares are registered.
