Bending Spoons has agreed to acquire Airtable in an all-cash transaction valuing the American no-code software company at an enterprise value of $1.285 billion, the two companies announced on Tuesday, August 4, 2026. It is the Milan-based acquirer's first deal since its Nasdaq debut on July 1 — and its most consequential purchase yet for the developer and operations tooling market.
Together with Airtable's net cash balance, the transaction implies an equity value of roughly $2.25 billion for shareholders. The deal is expected to close later this year, subject to regulatory approvals and customary closing conditions. Both companies will continue to operate independently until then.
Key Highlights
- Enterprise value of $1.285 billion, all cash; implied equity value of approximately $2.25 billion including Airtable's net cash
- Airtable's annual recurring revenue reached approximately $480 million as of June 2026, growing more than 20% year over year
- The platform is used by over 500,000 organizations, including 80% of the Fortune 100
- First acquisition since Bending Spoons listed on Nasdaq under the ticker BSP on July 1, 2026
- Shares of Bending Spoons rose 2.84% to $37.25 in Tuesday premarket trading
A Steep Round Trip for a No-Code Pioneer
Founded in 2013, Airtable built its reputation by collapsing the boundary between the spreadsheet and the relational database. It let non-engineers assemble working applications and operational workflows from a familiar grid interface — a category-defining product in what became the no-code movement.
The valuation tells a harder story. Airtable raised roughly $1.4 billion across its life as a private company and was valued at $11.4 billion at the height of the 2021 software funding boom. The agreed enterprise value of $1.285 billion is a fraction of that mark, even accounting for the larger equity figure driven by the company's substantial cash reserves.
That gap is not unique to Airtable. It reflects a broad repricing of the 2021 SaaS cohort, where growth multiples compressed sharply and companies that raised at peak valuations have struggled to grow into them. Airtable's revenue is healthy and still expanding at more than 20% annually — but at a pace the market now values very differently than it did five years ago.
The Bending Spoons Playbook
Bending Spoons describes its strategy as "acquire, transform, reinvest, repeat," targeting internal rates of return of roughly 65% on a levered basis and 25% unlevered. The model resembles private equity, with one stated difference: Bending Spoons keeps the brands it buys rather than flipping them.
Its portfolio is a catalogue of well-known internet properties — Evernote, Meetup, WeTransfer, StreamYard, Vimeo, and most recently AOL in January 2026 and Eventbrite in March 2026. Its July IPO raised $1.68 billion at $29 per share, and its filing identified more than 1,000 potential future acquisition targets.
The transformation half of that formula has been aggressive. At Evernote, acquired for $200 million in 2023, full-time headcount fell 82% — from 341 employees to roughly 60 by the end of 2024 — while the annual subscription price rose from about $100 to $249. WeTransfer saw a 75% staff reduction within weeks of its deal closing. The company recorded more than $78.6 million in reorganization-related expenses in 2025 after absorbing 1,830 staff from the AOL, Eventbrite, and Vimeo transactions, and has said it expects only a few hundred of those roles to remain by the end of 2026.
That record is why Tuesday's announcement carries weight beyond the headline number. Airtable is not a legacy consumer brand in decline; it is live infrastructure inside hundreds of thousands of organizations.
What the Companies Say
Airtable co-founder and chief executive Howie Liu framed the deal around the platform's next chapter. "The partnership with Bending Spoons provides us with the resources and long-term commitment to pursue our vision with even greater ambition, as we build the AI-native platform of the future," he said.
Bending Spoons chief executive Luca Ferrari pointed to Airtable's position in workflow management and collaborative software, describing the acquisition as a long-term investment focused on expanding the platform's capabilities.
Bending Spoons was advised by Willkie Farr and Gallagher as legal counsel, with Goldman Sachs and J.P. Morgan acting as financial advisors. Airtable was advised by Latham and Watkins, with AXOM Partners serving as financial advisor.
Impact on Teams Running on Airtable
For the organizations that depend on Airtable, the practical questions are pricing, roadmap, and API stability.
Bending Spoons has raised subscription prices at multiple acquired properties, and Airtable already sits at the higher end of the no-code market. Teams on annual contracts should expect renewal terms to be a live negotiation rather than a formality.
The second question is engineering continuity. Airtable is frequently used as a lightweight backend — its REST API and automation layer sit inside production workflows at agencies, startups, and enterprise operations teams. Deep headcount reductions in an acquired company's engineering organization historically slow feature delivery and can affect support responsiveness, even when the core service remains stable.
The prudent response is not panic but preparation: audit where Airtable sits on the critical path, confirm that data exports are current and automated, and know what a migration to a self-hosted or alternative backend would actually cost. That is standard vendor-risk hygiene, and an acquisition is the natural moment to run it.
Background
Bending Spoons began as a mobile app developer in Italy before shifting to acquiring established software businesses and optimizing them for profitability. A Forbes analysis published in July noted the scale of the bet: the company paid a combined $3.3 billion for AOL, Vimeo, and Eventbrite, against pro forma 2025 profit of roughly $22 million — a valuation that rests heavily on the margin expansion its restructuring model is designed to produce.
Notably, the company has built that empire by buying established software rather than chasing frontier AI. The Airtable deal, with its explicit "AI-native platform" framing, is the clearest signal yet that the strategy is evolving.
What's Next
The transaction requires regulatory clearance and is expected to close before the end of 2026. Until it does, Airtable continues to operate independently, and existing contracts remain in force.
The signals worth watching after closing are the ones that have historically arrived quickly in Bending Spoons deals: pricing changes at renewal, the shape of the engineering organization, and whether the AI roadmap Liu described materializes as shipped product or remains an acquisition-day talking point.
Source: Business Wire