Bending Spoons buys Airtable for $1.285B in first deal since Nasdaq debut
What's the deal? Bending Spoons has entered a definitive agreement to acquire Airtable in an all-cash transaction valuing the company at an enterprise value of $1.285 billion. Including Airtable's net cash, that implies an equity value of roughly $2.25 billion. The deal is expected to close later this year, pending regulatory approvals.
Who's who? Milan-based Bending Spoons buys digital businesses, overhauls them, and reinvests earnings into more acquisitions. Airtable, founded in 2013, offers a flexible workspace that lets teams build apps and manage workflows without technical skill.
By the numbers: Airtable's annual recurring revenue grew more than 20% year-on-year to about $480 million as of June 2026. More than 500,000 organisations, including 80% of the Fortune 100, use the platform.
Why now? This is Bending Spoons' first acquisition since its Nasdaq listing on July 1, 2026. It follows purchases of AOLDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom → in January 2026 and Eventbrite in March 2026.
What's the endgame? "Partnering with Bending Spoons gives us the resources and the long-term commitment Airtable needs," said Howie LiuDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, Airtable co-founder and chief executive officer, pointing to plans to build "the AI-native platform of the future."
What could go wrong? Both companies will keep operating independently until closing, which hinges on regulatory approvals. Bending Spoons' model relies on deep transformations — reorganising teams and overhauling technology — that can unsettle existing customers.
The signal: Bending Spoons is compounding a decade-old playbook: acquire, optimise, and reinvest, having never sold a material business. Adding Airtable to AOL and Eventbrite signals an accelerating push to consolidate established software brands under one operator.
The bigger picture: Matt Levine, writing about the deal, drew a parallel with "search funds" — the vehicle that made it attractive for Harvard MBAs to buy and run unsexy businesses like HVAC and pest control. Bending Spoons is doing the same for ambitious engineers, making it sexy to run old, unsexy digital businesses such as Evernote, Vimeo, AOL, and Eventbrite.
Operator's postmortem — "Airtable's Road Not Traveled": hari raghavan, an indirect Airtable shareholder since his wife joined as engineer #12 in 2018, published a detailed analysis of what went wrong and what could have been.
Is the valuation fair? The $1.275B ex-cash enterprise value implies a 2.7x ARR multiple — in line with comparables Monday.com and Asana (both ~2.2x sales with similar growth). Airtable did not exit below capital raised: it raised $1.3B and created ~$1B of additional value. A two-year forward gross-profit multiple suggests 3-4x, implying $1.3-1.5B EV — squarely in range.
Who made what. Late-stage investors (Series C through F — XNDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, Greenoaks, Thrive, Benchmark, Coatue) received roughly 1x via liquidation preference. CRV, which led multiple early rounds, returned an estimated 5-10x (~20% IRR). Seed investors (Caffeinated Capital, DCVC, Tuesday Capital, and several angels) saw ~28x / 34% IRR — strong in absolute terms, but a fraction of the 270x / 230% IRR they had on paper in late 2021. Founders Howie Liu, Emmett Nicholas, and Andrew Ofstad realised a combined ~$150M.
Three structural challenges. First, Airtable's product bridged spreadsheets and software for non-coders — but agentic coding obliterated that gap within two years. Users migrated to Supabase, Neon, and vanilla Postgres, generating custom frontends with Codex or Claude Code. Second, the organisation lost its original engineering DNA as it scaled, with key early engineers leaving and big-company hires facing organ rejection. Third, the AI response was too incremental: Airtable AI and Omni (the agentic interface) did not work well enough, and the expanding product surface (Blocks → Extensions → Interfaces → Automations) became too technical for non-technical users yet not flexible enough for technical ones.
Hyperagent: "sold the fleet, kept the speedboat." Rather than "burning the boats" like Notion or Intercom, Airtable sold the legacy business to Bending Spoons and spun out Hyperagent into a separate entity before the deal. Existing investors get liquidity from the Airtable sale plus a call option on Hyperagent's future — a clean separation between the profitable but stranded past and the agentic future.
The road not traveled. Raghavan's proposed alternative: deprecate legacy no-code surfaces, harden Airtable's governed data infrastructure as an "Agent Substrate" (typed relational data, schemas, validation, permissions), rebuild interface primitives as agent-native components, and ship a greenfield application builder interfacing with legacy Airtable only through APIs and MCP. This would have combined Replit's generative experience with Retool-grade enterprise primitives — a software factory with built-in governance as a potential moat.
Read more: StreetInsider · Trung Phan on X · hari raghavan on X
Image credit: TimWilson
