Bending Spoons buys Airtable for $1.3B
Bending Spoons is buying Airtable, a spreadsheet-like tool that about 500,000 companies use to organise their work. The business costs $1.285B. Airtable’s shareholders receive about $2.25B, because the buyer also gets the roughly $965M sitting in Airtable’s bank account. Airtable was valued at $11B in 2021.
Why the deal has two prices
Airtable has roughly $965M of cash in the bank. Part of that is money it raised and did not spend — it raised $1.35B in total — and part of it the business generated itself, having been cash-flow positive since late 2024.
$1.285B is the price of the business: the product, the 500,000 customers, the $480M of sales. $2.25B is the price of the company, because a buyer gets the bank account along with the business.
The cash is not paid out separately. It is already counted in the $2.25B, and $2.25B is the figure the shareholders divide between them.
Airtable’s 2.7× exit multiple against other 2026 software exits
$1.285B is the enterprise value — the price of the business once its cash is deducted. Against roughly $480M of annual recurring revenue that is 2.7 times sales. The median venture-backed software exit in 2026 cleared 5.2 times.
Source: Dealroom.co exit multiples database (1,121 VC-backed acquisitions with a disclosed revenue multiple) · company announcements. Airtable = $1.285B EV ÷ ~$480M ARR at June 2026. Adding Airtable’s ~$965M net cash lifts the equity value to ~$2.25B, or 4.7× ARR.
Airtable’s sales roughly tripled between 2021 and 2026. Its valuation fell by 80% over the same period.
Airtable’s valuation at each funding round and at the exit
Post-money at each financing, then the exit. Airtable grew from about $156M to about $480M of revenue while the multiple fell from 71× to 2.7×.
Source: Dealroom.co funding rounds and valuations · secondary mark per press reports (Jan 2026). Multiples use Dealroom revenue estimates for the round year and reported ARR for 2026. Exit column shows equity value; the $1.285B enterprise value is 2.7× ARR.
At this price, who gets what is set by the terms each investor negotiated, not by how much of the company they own.
Later investors get their money back first
The rounds raised between 2018 and 2021 put in $1.29B. Their contracts let them take that money back before anything is divided among everyone else.
Source: Dealroom.co funding rounds; Dealroom waterfall model. Assumes 1× non-participating preferred, pari passu; each round takes the greater of its preference and its as-converted share. Directional, not a legal cap table.
The business sold for $1.285B and the 2018 to 2021 rounds are owed $1.29B, so the $960M that reaches everyone else is, in effect, Airtable’s cash balance. Split by round, it is the 2015 investors who did best.
Money in and money out, by financing round
Estimated gross proceeds. Every round from the Series C onwards returns 1.0×. The seed and Series A account for most of the gain.
Method: new ownership ≈ primary capital ÷ post-money; later rounds dilute prior cohorts; each round then takes the greater of 1× preference and its as-converted share of what is left. The undisclosed 2013 pre-seed sits inside “founders, employees & common”, so the earliest backers — Caffeinated Capital and Founder Collective — did better than the seed line shown.
Source: Dealroom.co funding rounds, valuations and investor records; Dealroom analysis. Return is the gross multiple of money returned, before fees and carry, and is not a realised fund return. Roughly right, not a legal cap table.
Who did well
Airtable’s 2015 backers bought their shares when the company was worth very little, so even this price multiplies their money many times over. The seed investors — Freestyle, BoxGroup and the angels alongside them — put in $3M and get about $135M back, 45 times what they paid. CRV led the $7.6M Series A later that year and gets about $180M, 24 times.
Founders and employees hold about a third of the company. They are paid last, after every investor has taken their share, and $405M is left for them.
The investors who came in later paid much higher prices for the same company. What they bought was the right to take their money back before anyone else, and that is all they get: the four rounds from 2018 to 2021 put in $1.29B and take out $1.29B, four to eight years later.
Bending Spoons pays multiples in this range routinely.
Revenue multiples Bending Spoons has paid on its disclosed acquisitions
Revenue multiples on its disclosed deals. At $2.25B of equity value Airtable is its largest acquisition, and the only target still growing at 20%.
Source: Dealroom.co exit multiples database · company announcements. Deals with an undisclosed price (Evernote, WeTransfer, Meetup, Komoot, Tractive, StreamYard, Issuu) are excluded. Revenue is the target’s last reported year before acquisition.
Set that against what the market pays for Bending Spoons’ own revenue.
Airtable’s exit multiple against Bending Spoons’ own market multiple
Since listing on Nasdaq on 1 July, Bending Spoons’ own revenue has been valued at 13.9×. Airtable’s revenue costs it 2.7×, so the same revenue is worth about five times more once it sits inside the listed company, before any costs are cut.
Source: Dealroom.co · Nasdaq. BSP at $36.22 (3 Aug 2026 close), $23.0B market cap ÷ $1.65B TTM revenue = 13.9×. The middle bar is the like-for-like equity-value comparison; Bending Spoons carries net debt, so its enterprise-value multiple — and the gap — is wider still.
What this means
Airtable is a real business with $480M of sales, and it sold for 2.7 times those sales. The people who backed it in 2015 still did well, and the staff share $405M. The investors who paid the high 2021 prices got their money back and nothing more. Bending Spoons buys sales at 2.7 times while the stock market values its own sales at nearly 14 times, which is where the deal makes money for the buyer.