A healthy business, priced like a distressed one
Bending Spoons has agreed to acquire Airtable for $1.28 billion in cash - an enterprise value that, with Airtable's net cash, implies roughly $2.25 billion in equity value. It is the Italian acquirer's first deal since going public on Nasdaq in July at an $18 billion valuation. The numbers around the transaction are the story. Airtable raised more than $1.4 billion across its life and was valued above $11 billion at the 2021 peak; earlier this year its shares reportedly traded on secondary markets around $4 billion. Yet the business is not broken: annual recurring revenue grew more than 20% year-over-year to approximately $480 million as of June 2026, and the platform serves over 500,000 organisations, including 80% of the Fortune 100. In January it launched Superagent, an orchestration product letting users spin up teams of AI agents to perform tasks, and CEO Howie Liu framed the deal as giving Airtable resources and long-term commitment to build an AI-native platform.
Why the discount exists
Two forces. First, the general-purpose assistant squeeze: tools like ChatGPT and Claude have absorbed a meaningful share of the "organise data and build a lightweight internal app" job that Airtable pioneered, compressing the premium a no-code platform can command. Second, the acquirer's model: Bending Spoons specialises in buying companies trading at a discount to private valuations, streamlining products, trimming staff, and running them profitably - a portfolio that already includes Evernote, WeTransfer, Eventbrite, and Vimeo. Selling at roughly 2.5x ARR for a growing, profitable software business is a striking mark in a market where AI-native startups raise at 50x forward revenue.
What every software board should extract from this
- The AI premium is bifurcating the market, not lifting it. Being an established, growing, profitable SaaS company no longer protects your multiple if buyers believe a general-purpose assistant can approximate your core job. Ask honestly which parts of your product survive that test, and price your roadmap accordingly.
- If you are an Airtable customer, plan for the acquirer's playbook: expect product streamlining, pricing changes, and possible sunsetting of peripheral features. Export critical workflows and confirm data portability now, while the deal is pending, rather than after the integration begins.
- For corp-dev and investors, this is a live comparable: growing 20%+ with $480M ARR cleared roughly 2.5x revenue. Use it when marking private SaaS positions, and expect more 2021-vintage unicorns to transact at similar resets over the next 18 months.
- The opportunity side: disciplined acquirers with public currency are hunting. If you run a good business with a bloated cap table and a stale valuation, buyers exist - but they will price to their model, not to your last round.