Airtable sells for $1.28bn, having raised $1.4bn

Bending Spoons said on Tuesday it has agreed to buy Airtable for $1.28 billion in cash. It is the acquirer's first deal since listing last month.

Airtable was founded in 2013 and has raised more than $1.4 billion across multiple rounds. The cash price is therefore below the total capital investors put into the company.

At the top of the 2021 market, Airtable was valued at over $11 billion. Earlier this year its shares were reported to be changing hands on secondary markets at a $4 billion valuation.

Bending Spoons says that once Airtable's net cash and equivalents are counted, the business is being valued at about $2.25 billion. That is the acquirer's own framing of the number, and it is the one worth reading twice.

On any of those measures the exit is a down round with a signature on it. The $11 billion mark is five years and roughly nine-tenths of a valuation ago.

The operating business is not the problem. Bending Spoons founder Luca Ferrari said annual recurring revenue grew more than 20% year on year to approximately $480 million as of June 2026. That figure comes from the buyer's statement, not from audited accounts.

Airtable chief executive Howie Liu said in January that the company serves over 500,000 organisations, including 80% of the Fortune 100. That was alongside the launch of Superagent, a product line for spinning up teams of AI agents to run tasks.

So a company with roughly $480 million of recurring revenue on the buyer's account is selling for 1.28 billion in cash. Growing revenue and a growing valuation stopped being the same thing some time ago.

For anyone holding paper in a 2021-vintage cap table, the mechanics matter more than the headline. Preferred shares are usually paid before common shares, and a price below total capital raised is where those terms start to bite.

The deal terms have not been published, so who is paid what is not knowable from here. That is precisely the document employees at similarly-aged companies should be asking to see: the liquidation preference, the participation rights, and the strike price on their own options.

Bending Spoons went public in July at an $18 billion valuation. Its method is well established: buy companies trading at a discount to their private valuations, cut staff, narrow the product line and run them profitably.

Its previous purchases include Evernote, WeTransfer, Eventbrite and Vimeo. Airtable staff can read that list as a forecast.

The founder's takeaway is unglamorous. A 2021 valuation was a price agreed on one day by one set of buyers, and the exit market is now setting a different one — so it is worth knowing today, in writing, where you sit in the stack when someone finally pays cash.

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