The deal is done
Bending Spoons completed its acquisition of Airtable on September 4, 2026, a month after the two companies announced the agreement on August 4. The deal is an all-cash purchase of 100% of Airtable's shares at an enterprise value of $1.285 billion, which works out to roughly $2.25 billion in equity value once Airtable's own cash balance is factored in. It's Bending Spoons' first acquisition since the Italian company listed on the Nasdaq on July 1, 2026, at an $18 billion valuation.
Airtable's chief executive and co-founder, Howie Liu, framed the sale as a vote of confidence in the buyer's staying power, saying he was confident Bending Spoons has the resources and long-term perspective to help Airtable continue delivering exceptional value to its customers. Bending Spoons founder Luca Ferrari described Airtable as a pioneering brand reshaping how teams organize data and manage critical workflows, and said the plan is for teams to bring their data, context, and AI agents together in one place and expand their use of the platform over time.
How a once $11 billion company sold for a fraction of that
Airtable's trajectory explains why this deal happened at this price. Founded in 2013, the no-code database and workflow company raised more than $1.4 billion over its life and hit a peak valuation of over $11 billion in 2021, near the top of the last venture funding cycle. That valuation didn't hold. By early 2026, secondary market trades reportedly put the company closer to $4 billion, and the deal that just closed values it at little more than half of even that discounted figure.
What makes the sale notable is that Airtable wasn't struggling by ordinary business metrics. As of June 2026 the company had roughly $480 million in annual recurring revenue, growing more than 20% year over year, and a customer base of over 500,000 organizations including 80% of the Fortune 100. A company with that kind of scale and growth selling for barely a quarter of its 2021 peak says less about Airtable's health and more about how far private software valuations have come back down to earth, and how little patience later-stage investors now have for waiting out a recovery.
The buyer's track record
Bending Spoons has a specific and by now well-documented playbook, and it's worth understanding before drawing conclusions about what happens to Airtable next. The company has previously acquired Evernote, WeTransfer, Eventbrite, and Vimeo, and its results run heavily toward efficiency over growth: Bending Spoons generated $1.31 billion in revenue in 2025 with just 620 employees, a revenue-per-employee figure that climbed from $1.12 million in 2023 to $2.57 million in 2025.
That efficiency has come from cutting deeply into acquired companies' cost bases and, in several cases, their prices. After buying Evernote in 2022, Bending Spoons raised the Evernote Pro plan from $37 a year to $250 a year by 2026. After acquiring WeTransfer in 2024, it cut roughly 75% of staff, 260 of 350 people, within two months. Video tool StreamYard, also acquired in 2024, lost about 150 staff in a similar restructuring.
What this means in practice
Nothing about Airtable's product changes today. Bases, automations, integrations, and existing views continue to function exactly as before, and neither company has announced specific plans for pricing, headcount, or the product roadmap. But Bending Spoons' history gives Airtable's 500,000-plus customer organizations a reasonably clear pattern to watch for: not an abrupt shutdown, which doesn't fit the acquirer's model of buying and running established products, but a period of slower feature development paired with a real chance of price increases once the deal settles in. Airtable customers on annual contracts have some room to watch and see; those renewing soon, or evaluating competitors for new projects, have more reason to pay attention to how the next few quarters play out before committing further.
For information systems teams, the deal is also a reminder of how much operational risk sits inside a single vendor's cap table rather than its uptime dashboard. Airtable's outages and feature releases were never the concern for the 500,000 organizations built on it; who owns the company, and what that owner optimizes for, always was. A workflow platform can be technically stable and still become a strategic liability the day its ownership changes hands and its incentives change with it.
