Bending Spoons to acquire productivity software startup Airtable for $1.285B
SiliconANGLE Maria Deutscher
Bending Spoons is buying Airtable for $1.285 billion in cash. That's well below Airtable's $11.7 billion valuation from 2021, showing how far spreadsheet-startup hype has cooled.
Based on reporting by SiliconANGLE, Maria Deutscher — read the original for the full story.
Summary, retelling and take written by AI under human oversight; images are AI-generated illustrations. How we work · Report an error
Bending Spoons just made its first big move since going public, and it's a discounted one. The Italian holding company announced plans to acquire Airtable, the cloud spreadsheet platform, for $1.285 billion in an all-cash deal. That figure is actually less than the roughly $1.4 billion Airtable had raised from investors over the years, and a steep comedown from the $11.7 billion valuation it hit after a $735 million Series F round back in 2021.
The timing matters. Bending Spoons raised $1.68 billion when it listed on the Nasdaq last month, and Airtable is the first acquisition to come out of that fresh war chest. The company has a pattern here: buy established software, then quietly pile on improvements to squeeze out better financial performance. It's added more than 30 features to Vimeo since grabbing it last November, and made over 200 tweaks to Evernote in the two years since that deal closed.
Airtable itself is more than a spreadsheet with a nicer interface. Teams use it to track to-do items and leads, but the platform also lets people build automation workflows — say, pinging an executive the moment a key task gets checked off. Built-in AI agents can pull in web data, spot patterns, and generate visualizations, with admins able to pick which third-party large language model powers those agents. There's also an app-building layer: a tool called Omni for simple internal programs, paired with Portals for external-facing apps complete with login screens and forms. A separate feature, HyperDB, gets around the platform's usual data limits by hooking into outside repositories like Snowflake, supporting spreadsheets with up to 100 million rows.
The numbers suggest Airtable isn't struggling for adoption — more than 500,000 organizations use it, including most of the Fortune 100, and annual recurring revenue climbed over 20% in the past year to $480 million. Bending Spoons, for its part, pulled in $601.3 million in total sales just in its first fiscal quarter. CEO Luca Ferrari framed the deal as a long-term bet, saying the plan is to double down on Airtable's core strength of pulling teams and workflows into one flexible workspace. The acquisition is expected to close by the end of the year.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
A $1.285 billion price tag on a company once valued at $11.7 billion is a blunt reminder that plenty of pandemic-era software darlings were priced on vibes, not revenue multiples. Airtable's actual business — half a million organizations, most of the Fortune 100, revenue growing more than 20% — looks genuinely solid, which makes the discount less about Airtable failing and more about investors finally pricing SaaS like a real business again. Bending Spoons' playbook of buying mature products and grinding out incremental feature work is unglamorous, but it's the kind of discipline that tends to outlast hype cycles.”
Read more about this at: SiliconANGLE