Bending Spoons to acquire Airtable for $1.285 billion in first post-IPO deal
The Milan-based app developer, which listed on Nasdaq a month ago, will pay $1.285 billion in cash for the San Francisco no-code platform, marking its largest acquisition yet.
The deal
Bending Spoons has agreed to acquire Airtable in an all-cash transaction that values the US software firm at an enterprise value of $1.285 billion. Including Airtable's net cash position, the implied equity value is about $2.25 billion. Both boards approved the deal unanimously, and closing is expected by the end of 2026, subject to regulatory approvals. Advisors on the transaction include Willkie Farr & Gallagher, EY Advisory, Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan, Latham & Watkins and Axom Partners.
Airtable is a pioneering brand reshaping how teams organize data and manage critical workflows.
The acquisition is Bending Spoons' first since its Nasdaq debut on 1 July 2026. Its shares closed at $36.22 on Monday, well above the $29 IPO price. The deal is also the company's largest ever, surpassing earlier purchases of AOL in January and Eventbrite in March.
- Acquires Evernote
- Acquires WeTransfer
- Acquires AOL
- Acquires Eventbrite
- Agrees to acquire Airtable
Airtable's trajectory
Founded in 2013 by Howie Liu, Airtable blends a spreadsheet interface with a database engine, letting teams build custom applications without coding. More than 500,000 organizations now use it, including 80% of the Fortune 100. Annual recurring revenue grew over 20% year-on-year to approximately $480 million as of June 2026. In January, Airtable launched Superagent, an orchestration platform for spinning up teams of AI agents.
The partnership with Bending Spoons offers us the resources and long-term commitment to pursue this vision with even greater ambition, as we build the AI-native platform of the future.
Despite that momentum, the sale price represents a sharp markdown from Airtable's private-market peak. The company raised over $1.4 billion and was valued at $11.7 billion in 2021. Earlier this year, secondary-market trades implied a valuation of about $4 billion. The $2.25 billion equity value crystallizes that decline.
- 2021 peak
- 11.7 $B
- Early 2026 (secondary)
- 4 $B
- Aug 2026 (deal equity)
- 2.25 $B
Bending Spoons' playbook
Bending Spoons has built a reputation for buying established digital businesses, then deeply restructuring them to extract profit. After acquiring Evernote in 2022, it laid off 129 staff, later cut most of the remaining team and moved operations to Europe. Prices rose and the free tier shrank. WeTransfer followed a similar path after its 2024 acquisition: the company planned to cut about 75% of staff, and in July 2025 it briefly added a terms clause that users interpreted as granting AI-training rights over their files before reversing course within days.
We want to invest in Airtable for the long term and focus on its strength: bringing teams and workflows together in a single flexible space.
Ferrari's promise of a long-term approach contrasts with the rapid cost-cutting applied to earlier acquisitions. Bending Spoons says it has never sold a material business, and it funds its deals through cheap debt and reinvested portfolio earnings. The Airtable transaction is the third acquisition in a year and the first test of whether the model scales in public markets.
What happens next
The deal is expected to close by year-end, after which Bending Spoons will begin integrating Airtable into its portfolio. The company has not disclosed specific plans for staffing or product changes, but its history suggests a thorough operational overhaul. Airtable's existing customer base and growing recurring revenue give it a stronger starting point than some of Bending Spoons' earlier targets. The acquisition also lands amid a broader reset in software valuations, with Airtable becoming one of the first high-profile SaaSpocalypse sales.
