Airtable Was Worth $11 Billion. It Just Sold to Bending Spoons for $1.28 Billion.

If you use Airtable to run something, a small production schedule, a client tracker, the spreadsheet that got out of hand, today's news deserves your attention for one reason: Bending Spoons is buying it. The Italian company agreed Tuesday to acquire Airtable in an all-cash deal valuing it at $1.285 billion in enterprise value, or roughly $2.25 billion counting Airtable's cash.

That's a fine outcome by most measures and a brutal one by the measure that matters to Airtable's investors. In 2021 the company was valued at over $11 billion. Earlier this year its shares were reportedly changing hands on secondary markets around $4 billion. Airtable raised more than $1.4 billion over its life. The math does not work out the way anyone hoped.

The business was fine. The valuation wasn't.

This is worth being precise about, because "acquired at a discount" often gets read as "failing product." Airtable's annual recurring revenue grew more than 20 percent year over year to roughly $480 million as of June. It serves over 500,000 organizations including 80 percent of the Fortune 100. In January it launched Superagent, an orchestration platform for spinning up teams of AI agents.

Half a billion in revenue growing 20 percent is a real company. It just isn't an $11 billion company, and once you've taken money at that number, the gap between what you are and what you promised becomes its own kind of problem. That gap is precisely what Bending Spoons shops for.

Know the buyer

Bending Spoons has a repeatable playbook: acquire well-known digital businesses trading below their private valuations, cut staff, simplify the product line, and run the thing profitably. Its portfolio already includes Evernote, WeTransfer, Vimeo, Eventbrite, and AOL, which it picked up in January.

If you used Evernote through that transition, you have a sense of what this can feel like from the customer seat: price changes, feature consolidation, plans reshuffled, and a product that gets leaner in ways that are good for margins and mixed for the people who built workflows on top of it. Bending Spoons went public on Nasdaq in July at roughly an $18 billion valuation, and this is its first acquisition since. It says it has never sold a material business, which is at least a signal it intends to keep what it buys.

What Airtable users should actually do

Nothing urgent. The deal is expected to close before year-end pending regulatory approval, and both boards have approved it. CEO Howie Liu framed the deal as giving Airtable the resources and long-term commitment to build an AI-native platform.

That said, if Airtable is load-bearing for your work, this is a reasonable moment to do two boring things. Confirm you can export your bases in a format you could actually rebuild from. And find out what your renewal looks like, since pricing is usually the first thing that moves after an acquisition like this one.

The broader read is the more uncomfortable one. A generation of software companies raised at 2021 numbers and now has to either grow into them or find a buyer who's honest about what they're worth. Bending Spoons has built an $18 billion business on being that buyer, which tells you how many companies are in that position.