You Know the Apps. You Probably Don’t Know the Company Buying Them.

It owns Evernote, Vimeo, WeTransfer and several other familiar internet brands. Now Berkshire Hathaway is putting even more money behind it.

Think about the apps you use every week. Maybe you use Evernote to keep notes, WeTransfer to send files, or Vimeo to host videos. They’re different products, built for different customers, and most people probably don’t associate them with one another.

But there’s something they have in common. They’re all part of the same company: Bending Spoons, an Italian tech business that has spent years buying established internet products and rebuilding them under new ownership.

And it’s getting some serious attention.

On October 14, Berkshire Hathaway announced a further $330 million investment in Bending Spoons, on top of the $600 million it invested during the company’s July IPO. That takes Berkshire’s total investment to $930 million and its ownership stake to 4%, according to Bending Spoons’ regulatory filing.

That’s a lot of money for a company whose name most consumers wouldn’t recognize. So what exactly is Bending Spoons doing that has attracted this kind of backing?

The business model is almost the opposite of a typical startup

Most founders start with an idea, build a product, find their first customers and spend years trying to grow. It’s difficult, expensive and there’s no guarantee anyone will want what you’ve made.

Bending Spoons often takes a different route. Instead of starting from zero, it buys products that already have customers, established brands and working business models. Then it tries to improve the technology, product experience and financial performance.

The company has acquired familiar names including Evernote, Vimeo, WeTransfer and Eventbrite. It has also expanded through other digital businesses, building a portfolio that reaches far beyond a single app.

The strategy is closer to buying and operating existing businesses than launching a new startup every year. And rather than immediately selling those businesses again, Bending Spoons generally aims to own and develop them for the long term.

According to Euronews’ profile of the company, its annual revenue grew from $387 million in 2023 to $1.31 billion in 2025. Acquisitions have played a major role in that growth, which is an important distinction: buying revenue is not the same as growing a business organically.

Still, the model raises an interesting question. What if you don’t need to invent the next big thing? What if there’s already a useful product out there that simply needs better execution?

Why this strategy works and where it gets uncomfortable

An established product has something new startups spend years trying to build: customer habits. People already know the brand, understand the product and have a reason to keep using it. That creates a starting point that a brand-new company doesn’t have.

Bending Spoons says it combines engineering, data analysis, product development and operational improvements across the companies it owns. In theory, that shared expertise lets it improve products faster than each business could manage on its own.

But there is another side to the story.

After acquiring Evernote, Bending Spoons significantly reduced its workforce and changed its pricing. Its restructuring of WeTransfer also drew attention after plans to cut a large share of its staff. The company argues that leaner teams and better technology can improve execution, but these decisions have naturally attracted criticism from workers and customers.

That trade-off matters. A company can become more profitable without every customer becoming happier, and a higher subscription price doesn’t automatically mean a better product.

For anyone building software, this is worth remembering: operational efficiency matters, but so does the reason customers chose your product in the first place. If the new owner removes the very things people valued, the short-term financial gain may come at a cost.

The lesson for smaller builders

You don’t need millions of dollars to learn something from Bending Spoons. The useful lesson isn’t necessarily to start buying other companies. It’s to look more carefully at what makes a software business valuable.

A product with a small but loyal customer base may be more interesting than a flashy idea that has attracted plenty of attention but very few paying users. A tool people rely on every week has a different kind of value from one they try once and forget.

That also changes how you think about competition. You don’t always need to create an entirely new category. Sometimes the opportunity is to serve a specific group better, fix the parts of an existing product that frustrate people, or build a simpler alternative to something overly complicated.

We’ve seen a different version of this idea in our earlier SpaceX and Cursor story, where the value wasn’t just in the underlying technology but in the product built around it.

The bigger point is that building a business doesn’t have to follow one formula. You can invent something new, improve an existing product or acquire a business that already works. Each path comes with different costs and risks, but all of them start with understanding what customers actually value.

Bending Spoons is an interesting company to watch because it has made that alternative path its entire strategy. Whether it can keep improving its products while managing the trade-offs of rapid expansion is the part worth following next.

Stay sharp,

Builder Hustle