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Less than four months later, the Milan-based firm has emerged as a surprising home for former high-flying software startups that have been thrust aside by the artificial intelligence boom. Its M&A plan got a major boost this week from the most famous holding company on the planet: Berkshire Hathaway.

Berkshire, which Bending Spoons describes as a "longstanding inspiration" for its strategy, has now invested over $900 million in the company, including a $330 million stake disclosed on Wednesday. Wall Street loved the deal, sending Bending Spoons' stock up 41%, though some of those gains were lost later in the week, leaving the company with a market cap of about $30 billion.

"Berkshire's decision to add to its position just a few months after the IPO and at these levels provides another vote of confidence in the Bending Spoons model from one of the world's most respected long-term investors," wrote analysts at Mizuho, in a report after the announcement.

The other big news out of Bending Spoons this week underscores the flipside of the business: job cuts. In August, Bending Spoons announced it was buying workflow software provider Airtable for about $1.3 billion, or almost 90% below the company's peak valuation from late 2021. Bending Spoons said Monday that a "large portion of the pre-acquisition team" from Airtable would be leaving with "substantial separation packages." Layoffs were previously implemented at Evernote, Vimeo, WeTransfer and others in the portfolio.

Shares of Intuit, HubSpot and Adobe are all down at least 30% this year, and a long list of private SaaS companies that were once venture darlings are now struggling to find capital, with the public market showing no appetite for IPOs. Last month, Bending Spoons agreed to buy collaboration software vendor Miro, once valued at $17.5 billion, for $1.36 billion.

"You're either like a hot thing or you're nothing," said Ethan Kurzweil, founder and managing partner at Chemistry VC and a veteran software investor. Kurzweil said he uses Airtable, and said there are plenty of good SaaS products on the market led by solid teams, "but they're not on the frontier anymore."

An app turned acquirer

Bending Spoons was launched in 2013 by friends Luca Ferrari, the CEO, Matteo Danieli and Francesco Patarnello. A mobile app they'd created called Evertale failed to take off, and they used the $40,000 they had left to build an operating company instead of "products nobody wanted," according to the IPO prospectus.

Bending Spoons has announced all of its biggest deals in the last few years, beginning with Evernote in 2022, followed by Brightcove in 2024, and Vimeo, AOL and Eventbrite in 2025.

The company held its IPO on June 30, raising about $1.7 billion at $29 a share, and hit the Nasdaq the next day. The stock closed Friday at $47.07.

Stock chart of Bending Spoons since its July 1st initial public offering date.

Prior to Bending Spoons' recent jump into enterprise software, some of the leading acquirers in the space over the past decade were private equity behemoths Thoma Bravo and Vista Equity Partners. Those firms were aiming to buy what they viewed as undervalued SaaS companies and, through a combination of cost cuts, efficiency improvements and rollups, turn them into assets that could be sold or taken public at a higher price.

Bending Spoons is using a different playbook. The company isn't looking for eventual exits but rather wants to generate profits from the businesses it buys, similar to the Warren Buffett model. But unlike Berkshire, Bending Spoons' focus is technology, and it's taking a hands-on approach with its own software, operations and personnel decisions.

Nick Mehta, former CEO of cloud software vendor Gainsight, said private equity firms are limited now because "they got their nose bloodied."

"They paid much higher prices and have so many troubled companies that it's difficult for them to take swings now," said Mehta, who sold Gainsight to Vista in 2020.

Thoma Bravo and Vista didn't respond to requests for interviews. Bending Spoons told CNBC in a statement that it hadn't been outbid for a target in "several years."

As the company started jumping into SaaS, Mehta said "Bending Spooned" became a verb in Silicon Valley, referring to companies getting scooped up for pennies on the dollar.

"Unfortunately, a lot of my friends in that game are stuck," Mehta said. "Investors want out but there are no buyers. Anything pre-ChatGPT is legacy now."

Lloyd Walmsley, an analyst at Mizuho, said Bending Spoons' model is distinct from the older buyout approach.

"I think there aren't a lot of people that do what these guys do in terms of the depth of operations and the willingness to make substantial product changes," Walmsley said in an interview. "It's not typical of traditional private equity firms to make anywhere near this level of change."

Matteo Danieli, co-founder of Bending Spoons, center, during the company's initial public offering (IPO) at the Nasdaq MarketSite in New York, US, on Wednesday, July 1, 2026.

Michael Nagle | Bloomberg | Getty Images

For customers of the companies that Bending Spoons buys, sudden price hikes can follow.

In April 2023, months after the Evernote acquisition, Bending Spoons lifted the annual personal subscription price to $130 from $70. Later, the company changed its offerings, charging $100 for its so-called starter plan and $250 for "Evernote Advanced," compared to the $170 it had been charging for the pro plan.

"My first reaction was like, Oh man, I guess I have to switch to OneNote," said Walmsley, referring to Microsoft's notetaking app. But he said he stuck with Evernote.

"They're really savvy at finding these things that they provide a lot of value, and the switching costs are really high," Walmsley said. "The price isn't that high relative to the switching cost."

Bending Spoons uses the profits from its portfolio companies for future growth, the "overwhelming majority" of which comes from doing more deals, Ferrari told CNBC in an interview on Thursday.

"There are certain opportunities for improvement we can unlock over the first few years, and then the business will have whatever organic growth is intrinsic in that market," Ferrari said.

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For Berkshire and its fellow Bending Spoons investors, the bet is still unproven.

The products have to remain desirable enough that customers are willing to pay up at a time when AI is squeezing margins across much of the software sector. In its first earnings report as a public company in August, Bending Spoons said revenue more than doubled from a year earlier to over $700 million, with growth almost entirely driven by acquisitions, while net income climbed 171% to $177 million.

That was before the Airtable deal had closed and Miro had yet to be announced. In the coming quarters and years, Wall Street will get a clear picture of whether the firm's structure can revive software.

On the earnings call in August, an analyst asked whether Airtable represents a long-term shift in the M&A strategy towards enterprise.

Ferrari said that about half of Bending Spoons' revenue already comes from professional businesses, largely through Brightcove and Vimeo, which has an enterprise component. The focus on software of late, he said, has more to do with where he's finding value after a hefty selloff.

"Most enterprise SaaS businesses were valued at irrationally high levels until somewhat recently," Ferrari said. "We never saw those prices making any sense."

— CNBC's Ari Levy contributed to this report.

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Speaking as the IMF’s annual meetings in Bangkok wrapped up on Saturday, Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva said discussions with global policymakers showed both “optimism and worry”.

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“Optimism from the resilience of the global economy, the promise of AI, the dynamism of Asia,” Georgieva told reporters. “But AI is also recognised to be a source of worry and so are inflation, high levels of debt, wars, climate risks.”

Georgieva said vulnerable nations are missing out on the AI investment boom that is driving growth in richer countries while at the same time dealing with higher borrowing costs.

Higher global interest rates mean low-income countries now spend 8 to 14 percent of their revenue on debt repayments, up from previous years, she said.

“I can tell you that people everywhere, but especially in poorer countries, don’t like inflation. Inflation is like a tax on the poor,” Georgieva said.

The warnings came as low-income, oil-importing countries take the strongest hit from rising global energy costs. Prices have soared since February when the United States and Israel launched a war on Iran, leading to retaliatory strikes in the Middle East and disrupted oil and gas flows.

“Escalating conflicts ‌and trade tensions could further disrupt critical trade routes, exacerbate commodity price pressures, including in refined energy products, and worsen energy and food security,” said a statement issued by Saudi Finance Minister Mohammed Al-Jadaan, the chairman of the International Monetary and Financial Committee (IMFC).

The IMFC is the main steering committee for the 191-member crisis lender.

Debt relief and regional support

Georgieva said her organisation has a responsibility to help countries restructure debt if needed to assist with domestic resource mobilisation, bring in international finance and create conditions for private investment.

Such countries need to set spending targets that prioritise growth and protect the most vulnerable people, she said, adding that the IMF has a “relentless pursuit of more resources for low-income countries”.

“When we do our best, it translates into better lives for people,” she said.

Georgieva also said the IMF plans to back Iraq “very firmly” with a requested loan programme while talks with Lebanese authorities are making progress.

“We will get to Iraq both money and policy support,” she said. “In the case of Lebanon, we are in very intense discussions with Lebanese authorities. We have made significant progress towards the programme. We have still a bit more work to do together, and I’m confident we will be successful.” %!s()

“Thank you to the Lumières for inventing the movie camera, or we’d have been fucked,” joked Ethan, drawing laughs from the audience.

The musical choice itself was a nod to the Coens’ cult comedy “The Big Lebowski,” featuring John Turturro’s flamboyant bowler Jesus Quintana.

The star-studded gathering included Javier Bardem, Frances McDormand, former Lumière prize winner Wim Wenders, Robert Eggers, Michel Hazanavicius and Bérénice Bejo, Benoît Magimel, Antoine de Caunes and Caleb Deschanel, in town for a masterclass and the premiere of Laika’s upcoming stop-motion animated feature “Wildwood.”

Accepting the award, Joel reflected on four decades of filmmaking with his brother. “We did it because we love cinema and we love storytelling,” he said. “We’ve had, pretty much with certain exceptions, nothing but fun making these films over the decades.”

Bardem, who won an Oscar for his chilling portrayal of Anton Chigurh in “No Country for Old Men,” delivered one of the evening’s most colorful tributes, recalling how he initially tried to turn down the role despite being a longtime admirer of the Coens.

“I sat down with them in New York in their office and I was like, ‘Listen, I admire you, I worship you, you are amazing, but I hate violence, I don’t drive, and I can barely speak English. What the hell am I doing here?’” Bardem recalled.

“They gave me no reason whatsoever to do the movie. They were just laughing,” he said. “I thought, ‘I don’t know what this experience is going to be like, but I know it’s not going to be stressful. So yes, let’s fucking do it.’”

Bardem also joked about his character’s infamous haircut, which the Coens had spotted in a photograph from the 1960s. “I was single at the time – this is 2006 – and I said, ‘I’m gonna be single until the day I wrap.’”

Ethan had another story about Bardem’s commitment to the role. The actor had decided his character needed to be pale, he recalled, so during the largely outdoor shoot, a young production assistant would accompany him to the set holding a light blue parasol over his head. “And he wonders why we laughed at him,” Ethan joked.

The actor’s tribute took a more heartfelt turn as he reflected on what working with the brothers had meant to him. “What they gave me was one masterpiece and the gift of a lifetime, personally and professionally,” Bardem said. “They made a dream come true. Ten years after me saying that would never happen, it happened. And it was even better than I would have ever imagined.”

The evening also featured musical tributes, with French singer-songwriter Bénabar performing Charles Aznavour’s “Parce que tu crois,” chosen by Joel Coen as his favorite song. Five-time Grammy winner Angélique Kidjo delivered a rendition of Jacques Brel’s “Ne me quitte pas,” one of Bardem’s favorites.

Festival director Thierry Frémaux drew laughs by projecting photographs of the Lumière and Coen brothers striking remarkably similar poses, before reminding the filmmakers that, in keeping with festival tradition, they would have to shoot their own version of the Lumières’ first film, “Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory,” on Saturday. After screening one of the original versions, he gave them until the next day to come up with their own take.

The tribute also struck a timely note with the screening of Ettore Scola’s 1997 short “1943-1997,” which follows a young Jewish boy fleeing a Nazi roundup in wartime Rome who finds refuge in a movie theater. As five decades of Italian cinema unfold on screen, the boy grows old. The film ends in 1997 with a young African boy fleeing persecution into the same theater, drawing a parallel between past and present.

Bardem picked up on the film’s message, stressing its relevance today. “Never again is never again for everybody, from Congo to Sudan to Palestine,” he said.

Joel also paid tribute to Lyon’s community of film lovers and the festival’s commitment to the shared experience of cinema, praising audiences who still relish “gathering in a dark room with lots of other people and seeing it on a big screen.”

Since making their feature debut with the neo-noir thriller “Blood Simple” in 1984, Joel and Ethan Coen have built one of American cinema’s most distinctive filmographies, spanning the crime comedy “Raising Arizona,” cult favorite “The Big Lebowski,” Depression-era musical odyssey “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” and Western anthology “The Ballad of Buster Scruggs.”

Their 2007 thriller “No Country for Old Men” won four Oscars, including best picture, best director, best adapted screenplay and best supporting actor for Bardem, while “Fargo” earned the brothers their first Oscar for original screenplay in 1997.

At Cannes, their remarkable run began in 1991 when “Barton Fink” swept the Palme d’Or, best director and best actor prize for John Turturro. They went on to win best director for “Fargo” in 1996 and “The Man Who Wasn’t There” in 2001, while “Inside Llewyn Davis” took the Grand Prix in 2013. In 2015, they returned to the Croisette as presidents of the festival’s jury.

Friday’s honor makes Joel and Ethan the second filmmaking duo to receive the Lumière Award, following Belgian brothers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne in 2020. Previous recipients include Clint Eastwood, Quentin Tarantino, Pedro Almodóvar, Martin Scorsese, Catherine Deneuve, Wong Kar-wai, Jane Fonda, Francis Ford Coppola, Jane Campion, Tim Burton, Wim Wenders, Isabelle Huppert and Michael Mann.

The Lumière Film Festival wraps Sunday, Oct. 18. %!s()

Honeybees were also most likely to instigate, and win, competitive interactions, pushing out rivals to collect more pollen and nectar.

The number of managed bees has risen in the UK, as campaigns to “save the bees” resonate with the public, leading to a boom in hobbyists setting up beehives. The number of registered beekeepers has more than doubled, from 19,000 in 2010 to 47,000 in 2025, according to the National Bee Unit.

However, there are growing concerns that this growth in managed honeybees is harming other, wild, pollinators including bumblebees, by increasing competition for food and passing on diseases, especially in areas where there are fewer flowers or an especially high density of hives.

To better understand the nature of this competition, the study in Cambridgeshire observed pollinators over a two-year period as they foraged on bramble and ivy in areas close to honeybee colonies. The study documented the outcomes of 300 interactions between flower visitors from five groups: honeybees, bumblebees, solitary bees, hoverflies and “other”, which included types of flower-visiting and pollinating flies, butterflies, beetles and wasps.

In each interaction, the study noted where an individual “won”, by gaining access to a resource, “lost”, or if a resource was shared. Honeybees won in most of the encounters across both plant species.

Past research has suggested that honeybees outcompete other pollinators indirectly, by taking up resources. However, the Cambridgeshire study provides evidence that they are posing a more direct form of competition, known as “interference competition”, where a species might attack or chase others away.

“That’s important because, of course, it means that the wild pollinators are facing a challenge from both those types of competition from honeybees,” said Victoria Buckle, lead author of the study and a PhD researcher at Anglia Ruskin University.

Honeybees were actively avoided by other flower visitors in 28.4% of interactions on bramble and 35.6% on ivy.

In competitive interactions won by a honeybee, the honeybee either displaced other flower visitors – for example, by landing on them or pushing them off flowers – or chased them away, in about 20% of cases.

Bumblebees were also observed displacing other pollinators, though Buckle believes this was probably not intentional, and was instead a reflection of their less coordinated movements as they fly through confined spaces.

“They bumble along the patch and then they’ll mistakenly bump into another pollinator and it just falls off a flower,” Buckle said. “With the honeybees, the aggression was more overt. You could tell that they’re specifically trying to move the other one off the flower.”

The reasons for honeybees’ aggressive behaviour is likely to relate to the way in which they organise their social groups, said Buckle, adding: “Some castes of bees can be guard bees, so they have that capacity within them to show threat and aggression, to guard their hives and to look after the brood.”

The only pollinator able to hold its own against honeybees was the ivy bee, which was first recorded in the UK in 2001 and feeds mainly on the nectar of ivy flowers. It was seen displacing and chasing honeybees.

The study also found that higher temperatures led to an increased number of competitive interactions, probably because nectar was drying up and plants were going into heat stress. Given that mean summer temperatures are predicted to rise by up to 4C in the UK by 2080, such competition is likely to become more frequent, said Buckle.

More research is needed to examine how wild pollinators can be better protected, she added.

“A lot of beekeepers are environmentally minded and they want to make sure that they’re not impinging or having an impact on other pollinators,” Buckle said. “This research is important because it helps guide our planning and best practices for conservation.” %!s()

If you pay attention to online pop culture, especially on social media and microblogging platforms, you can often see some version of Munroe's lucky 10,000 theory in real time, as new audiences constantly rediscover old material.

One of the best examples of this recycling process comes from, of all places, Jim Davis's Garfield. 99% of the time, Garfield is a simple gag-a-day comic that relies on a handful of go-to punchlines: an orange cat that eats too much, a stupid dog, and their weird owner. It’s a strip that deliberately revels in the mundane, with jokes about coffee, laziness, and gluttony. Then there's that remaining 1%.

There are a handful of truly weird comics in the back alleys of what one hesitates to call the "Garfield canon." A useful example is the 1984 graphic novel anthology His 9 Lives, which includes a prose detective story, a science fiction parody, a chase sequence, and a weirdly effective horror short. There’s also the animated special Garfield in the Rough, which ends with an actual fight scene between Garfield and a wild panther.

The single strangest story in the actual newspaper comic, however, might be a G-rated horror arc that’s often nicknamed "Alone."

Missing: fat orange cat

Source: Jim Davis/Paws Inc.

On Oct. 23, 1989, the week before Halloween, readers opened their newspapers to find a distinctly different sort of Garfield. Davis's usual flat 2D layouts were replaced with moody backgrounds and Dutch angles, as Garfield wakes up to find himself alone in an empty house.

Garfield quickly discovers that not only are Jon and Odie gone, but the house looks like it’s been abandoned for years.

Source: Jim Davis/Paws Inc.

No one has lived there for a long time, including Garfield himself. It's as if Jon and Odie simply got up and walked out at some point years ago. Did they deliberately leave Garfield behind? Is Garfield a ghost? Is this a post-apocalyptic Garfield AU? What’s happening?

Source: Jim Davis/Paws Inc.

"After years of taking life for granted," the Oct. 28 strip reads, "Garfield is shaken by a horrifying vision of the inevitable process called 'time.' He has only one weapon... denial."

Source: Jim Davis/Paws Inc.

Garfield proceeds to freak out, at which point he seems to return to the present with Jon and Odie. The end. The moral of the story is that you should prize every moment with your loved ones, just in case you suddenly wake up in a dark future where none of you actually exist. (It is not a widely applicable moral.)

"An imagination is a powerful tool," the strip's narrator says to close out the story arc. "It can tint memories of the past, shade perceptions of the present, or paint a future so vivid that it can entice... or terrify."

The most obvious interpretation is that the "Alone" arc was simply a nightmare of Garfield’s. After this, the strip went back to its usual daily routine and has, for the most part, stayed there for 37 years.

That hasn't stopped fans from speculating, of course. Every time "Alone" comes back up in online discourse, a few more people independently conclude that the arc may never have actually ended. For nearly 40 years, this theory argues, every successive Garfield strip has been an elaborate delusion of Garfield's as he wanders through a cold, abandoned house. If the Internet loves one thing, it's dark interpretations of children's media, so the "Alone" theory of Garfield is likely to be with us for as long as Garfield itself.

Davis's only public comment on the "Alone" arc appears to have been in 1998's 20 Years & Still Kicking, a Garfield anniversary collection. That in itself is almost admirable. Davis simply threw these strips into the world like a live grenade, then let them speak for themselves for a full nine years.

"During a writing session for Halloween, I got the idea for this decidedly different series of strips,” Davis wrote. “I wanted to scare people. And what do people fear most? Why, being alone. We carried out the concept to its logical conclusion and got a lot of responses from readers. Reaction ranged from 'Right on!' to 'This isn't a trend, is it?'"

This isn't that out of character for Davis. While he's always been honest about how Garfield was originally made as a commercial enterprise, Davis has occasionally let some high weirdness into the comic. As noted above, that tendency is usually funneled into "safer" media like original graphic novels, but Garfield can go to some dark places (below).

Source: Jim Davis/Paws Inc.

For almost 40 years, though, the "Alone" arc has, well, stood alone. It's a brief dip into surreal horror that makes Garfield feel like a wholly different strip, and new fans will suddenly discover it every few years until the end of time. Maybe that ought to be the next cartoonists' challenge: make a successful children's comic for 11 years, then for just one week, turn it into the scariest thing you can think of. %!s()