Bending Spoons to acquire productivity software startup Airtable for $1.285B

Airtable just got sold for roughly a ninth of what investors once said it was worth. Bending Spoons, the Milan-based holding company that's built a business out of buying mature software products and squeezing more value from them, announced today it will pay $1.285 billion for the spreadsheet-and-workflow platform. For context, Airtable raised close to $1.4 billion over its life, including a $735 million Series F in 2021 that pegged the company at $11.7 billion. The math on this deal is brutal for early believers, even if Airtable itself insists its business is healthy.

And there's reason to think the underlying product is fine. Airtable says its annual recurring revenue climbed more than 20% over the past year to $480 million, and it counts over 500,000 organizations as customers, including most of the Fortune 100. The platform has grown well beyond a glorified spreadsheet tool. Users can build automation workflows, tap AI agents to enrich data and spot patterns, and even construct full applications using a pair of tools called Omni and Portals. A feature named HyperDB lets Airtable spreadsheets connect to external repositories like Snowflake, pushing supported row counts up to 100 million. This is a company that outgrew its original pitch.

So why the haircut? Late-stage venture valuations from 2021 were notoriously detached from reality, and plenty of unicorns from that era are quietly settling for exits well below their paper worth. Bending Spoons, for its part, isn't buying hype — it's buying cash flow and a loyal user base it thinks it can monetize better. The company has a track record here. Since acquiring Vimeo last November, it's shipped more than 30 new features. Evernote, picked up two years earlier, has seen over 200 improvements under Bending Spoons' ownership.

This is also the first acquisition Bending Spoons has made since going public on the Nasdaq last month, a listing that pulled in $1.68 billion. With fiscal first-quarter revenue of $601.3 million, the company clearly has appetite and capital to keep rolling up software brands people already rely on. CEO Luca Ferrari framed the deal as doubling down on what Airtable already does well — pulling teams and workflows into one flexible workspace — rather than reinventing it. Expect incremental polish, not a teardown. The deal is expected to close by the end of the year.