Bending Spoons agreed on Monday to buy Airtable for $1.285 billion in cash. The all-cash transaction implies an equity value of approximately $2.25 billion when combined with Airtable's net cash. Airtable was valued at $11 billion in December 2021 when it raised $735 million in a Series F round led by XN, with participation from Franklin Templeton, Salesforce Ventures, and Michael Dell's MSD Capital. Enterprise value has fallen 88 percent in four and a half years. Annual recurring revenue grew to approximately $480 million over the same period, up more than 20 percent year over year through June 2026.
The valuation collapsed. The revenue did not.
The Product
Airtable serves more than 500,000 organizations. Eighty percent of the Fortune 100 use it. The company reached cash flow positivity in late 2024. By every operating metric available, this is a company that works.
At $11 billion, the market was pricing what Airtable could become. At $1.285 billion, someone is pricing what Airtable does. The $9.7 billion between those numbers is the cost of a story that ran out of believers.
The Buyer
Bending Spoons listed on the Nasdaq on July 1 at $29 per share, raising $1.68 billion at an $18.4 billion valuation. The stock jumped 40 percent on its first day. Thirty-four days later came the first post-IPO acquisition.
The Milan-based company has completed more than fifty deals. Evernote in 2023. WeTransfer and Meetup in 2024. Vimeo, AOL, Brightcove, and Eventbrite followed. First-quarter 2026 revenue reached $601 million, more than double the $259 million a year earlier. Net income swung from a $112 million loss to a $28 million profit over the same period.
The playbook runs on a single observation: every acquired company has more revenue than it needs people to sustain. At Evernote, Bending Spoons cut headcount from 341 to 60 within twelve months. Four layers of management collapsed to two. At WeTransfer, seventy-five percent of staff were let go. At StreamYard, 154 employees became 44. The products kept running.
CEO Luca Ferrari's IPO prospectus lists more than 1,000 additional targets representing nearly $400 billion in aggregate revenue.
The Spread
Airtable at $1.285 billion on $480 million in ARR: 2.7 times revenue. Bending Spoons at $18.4 billion on first-quarter revenue annualizing to roughly $2.4 billion: more than 7 times.
The buyer trades at a higher multiple than the target. This makes sense only if the buyer's revenue is a different kind of asset. Airtable's ARR is a product generating cash. Bending Spoons' revenue is a machine that converts other companies' revenue into margin. A dollar inside Airtable is worth $2.70 to shareholders. Processed through Bending Spoons' cost structure, that dollar is worth more than $7.00.
The Stack
Total capital invested in Airtable over its lifetime reached $1.36 billion across multiple funding rounds. The enterprise value at sale is $1.285 billion. The business sold for less than the money put in to build it.
On secondary markets earlier this year, Airtable traded at roughly $4 billion. In five months the valuation fell again by two-thirds. Bending Spoons arrived at the moment when the last holders of the old narrative stopped defending it.
The write-down is not a failure of the product. It is a repricing from what someone might build to what someone will extract. The 2021 SaaS wave produced thousands of companies with strong products, growing revenue, and valuations built on the assumption that growth would accelerate forever. The growth slowed. The products survived. Each one is a write-down waiting to clear.