Airtable sells at 2.7x ARR, a ninth of its 2021 mark

Bending Spoons, the Milan-based acquirer, has agreed to buy Airtable in an all-cash deal at a $1.285bn enterprise value. Counting Airtable's net cash, equity value is roughly $2.25bn.

The deal is expected to close by the end of the year, subject to regulatory approval.

What the buyer gets is a solid business. Airtable had approximately $480m of ARR as of June 2026, growing more than 20% year on year, at roughly 90% gross margins.

It has been cash-flow positive since late 2024 and throws off over $100m a year. It counts more than 500,000 organisations as customers, including 80% of the Fortune 100.

That works out at 2.7 times ARR.

Set against the last private round, the number is brutal. In December 2021 Airtable raised $735m at an $11.7bn post-money valuation, at $187.28 per share, on ARR of around $156m. That was a 75x round.

The company was founded in 2012 by Howie Liu, Andrew Ofstad and Emmett Nicholas. It cut 491 people across two rounds of layoffs, then rebuilt around AI: Liu declared a "refounding" in June 2025, launched Omni and Field Agents, hired a former OpenAI engineering lead as CTO in October 2025, and shipped Superagent in January 2026, its first standalone product in 13 years.

The re-architecture produced 20% growth. Not 60%, and not re-acceleration.

Airtable had no forcing function to sell. No debt, no burn, roughly $700m in the bank. What it did not have was a route back to $11.7bn, or an S-1 that would not price below the last round.

One structural detail matters. A pre-signing reorganisation moved the assets and liabilities of the Hyperagent business line into a separate entity, Hyperagent Inc, before the sale. Bending Spoons cited the same ~$480m ARR after the carve-out, so the multiple holds either way.

The buyer's pattern is documented. Evernote's price went from $100 a year to $249. WeTransfer lost 75% of staff within weeks of closing. SEC filings show $78.6m of reorganisation expense in 2025 covering 1,830 people acquired from AOL, Eventbrite and Vimeo, with only a few hundred expected to remain by the end of 2026, and a further $75.8m in the first quarter of 2026 alone. Airtable has 935 employees.

The buyer type is not the explanation for the price. Thoma Bravo paid 2.2 times revenue for Verint, which has $909m of revenue and 21% AI ARR growth, and cut hundreds of staff within six months. The same firm paid in the 6x to 7x band for Dayforce and Olo. SaaS Capital puts the median B2B revenue multiple at around 4.1x, and Rule-of-40 companies at a median 10.7x.

The spread between 2x and 10x is growth plus margin. For any founder modelling an exit, Airtable is the benchmark: a good, profitable, well-known business growing 20% is now a cash-flow asset, priced accordingly, and no amount of capital raised on the way up changes that.

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