Bending Spoons acquires Airtable for $1.28 billion in cash, the Milan-headquartered software roll-up announced on Tuesday, picking up a once-richly valued database and workflow company for roughly 2.7x its annual recurring revenue and a steep discount to the valuation Airtable commanded at the height of the 2021 technology boom.
The deal, disclosed in a press release filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), is subject to regulatory approvals and customary closing conditions. It marks Bending Spoons’ first acquisition since it listed on Nasdaq on 1 July 2026 under the ticker BSP.
Why Bending Spoons Acquires Airtable at a Fraction of Its Former Value
Airtable, co-founded in 2013 by Howie Liu, Andrew Ofstad, and Emmett Nicholas and headquartered in San Francisco, had raised more than $1.4 billion across multiple funding rounds. Its high-water mark came in December 2021, when a $735 million Series F pushed its valuation to approximately $11.7 billion, according to Sacra. By early 2026, secondary-market trades implied a valuation closer to $4 billion.
The $1.28 billion figure represents enterprise value. Factor in Airtable’s approximately $965 million in net cash and cash equivalents, and the implied equity value lands at roughly $2.25 billion, which Bending Spoons confirmed, according to Dual Entry’s analysis of the deal structure. On that basis, the purchase price equates to roughly 2.7 times Airtable’s ARR.
‘Airtable is a pioneering brand reshaping how teams organise data and manage critical workflows. The value being delivered is reflected in annual recurring revenue growing over 20% YoY to approximately $480 million as of June 2026, and joining forces with Bending Spoons will accelerate innovation even further,’ Bending Spoons founder Luca Ferrrai said in a statement.
CEO Liu, for his part, had described Airtable’s reach at its January 2026 product event: more than 500,000 organisations served, including 80% of the Fortune 100. That same month, the company unveiled Superagent, an orchestration platform designed to let users deploy teams of AI agents across workflows.
The Bending Spoons Playbook, Applied at Scale
Bending Spoons has built its business around a repeatable model: acquire software brands trading at discounts to their private valuations, reduce headcount, simplify product lines, and drive towards profitability. Yahoo Finance, citing the company’s IPO filing, reported that Bending Spoons has completed more than 50 acquisitions to date and maintains a watch list of more than 1,000 businesses it considers candidates for future purchases.
Its current portfolio includes Evernote, WeTransfer, Vimeo, StreamYard, Remini, komoot, Harvest, and Brightcove, alongside AOL, which it acquired in January 2026, and Eventbrite, added in March 2026, according to the company’s investor newsroom. Across those businesses, Bending Spoons served more than 500 million monthly active users and over 9 million monthly paying customers as of March 2026.
The IPO itself gave some indication of investor appetite for the model. Bending Spoons priced its offering at $29.00 per share, a dollar above the top of its $26.00-to-$28.00 range, selling 57.97 million shares to raise $1.68 billion and giving it a market capitalisation of $18.42 billion at pricing. Shares opened at $31.00 on the first day of trading, a gain of 6.9% from the IPO price, per IPOScoop.
The capital structure gives founders substantial control. The four co-founders retained exclusive ownership of the company’s Class A shares and command approximately 82.71% of total voting power following the offering, according to the IPO filing. That concentration means the acquisition strategy answers to a tight inner circle, not a broad shareholder base.
The financial picture heading into the deal is one of growth against a net loss. IPOScoop reported that Bending Spoons posted a net loss of $84.54 million on revenue of $1.65 billion for the 12 months ended 31 March 2026, even as the company reported net income for the first quarter of 2026. Airtable itself was not profitable at the time of the deal announcement; its decision to take $1.28 billion in enterprise value from a consolidator rather than hold for a potential public listing signals how far sentiment has shifted since 2021.
The deal is now awaiting regulatory sign-off. Whether Bending Spoons can apply its trim-and-monetise formula to a product as complex and enterprise-facing as Airtable, without alienating the Fortune 100 clients it is acquiring, is the question the next few months will answer.
