Airtable Acquired By Bending Spoons
From $11B valuation to price tag of $1.285B is quite a fall. But there's more to the story.
Airtable’s bet on AI-everything-everywhere seems to have led to its sale. Or at maybe the leaders are bailing out ‘to pursue other interests’, as the bottom-feeder Bending Spoons has scooped the ‘spreadbase’ company. Or the SAAS part of it, anyway.
‘Spreadbase’ is my term for Airtable’s category of work technology, a portmanteau of spreadsheet and database:
Notion has spreadbase capabilities, too, and Obsidian, with its Bases implementation, has moved from being a pure-play ‘work processing’ system into the spreadbase zone, as well. Note: Obsidian announced that its importer tool will convert Airtable data into Markdown and Bases, available now.
As reported by Reworked:
Airtable reported annual recurring revenue of about $480 million as of June 2026, up more than 20% year over year, according to the company. It says 500,000 organizations use the product, including 80 of the Fortune 100.
If things were going well, why sell?
Looks like Howie Liu, the founder and CEO, spun out the Hyperagent agent platform developed at Airtable, prior to the deal. He’s very bullish on A.I., and is reading the tea leaves for Airtable’s product trajectory, perhaps. Or at least he doesn’t want to be there fighting the war against A.I. agents and vibe coding. He built an escape pod and exited.
As analyzed by Janelle Teng Wade:
Airtable had been dabbling with an AI pivot for over a year now, but had not shown growth reacceleration despite several new AI product launches, AI-pilled hires, and AI-native acquisitions. Incremental moves weren’t cutting it, so more drastic action was needed. Regardless of how you view the acquisition economics, I believe Airtable’s leadership deserves credit for making a bold call to embrace disruption instead of defending the status quo.
One key question: how much of the available capital was shunted over to Hyperagent, as part of the split?
Bending Spoons has busy since its founding, gobbling up all sorts of troubled software characterized by long tails of entrenched users. Evernote, Meetup, Vimeo, AOL, and now Airtable. Their pattern is to buy a company, lay nearly everyone off, and manage what remains with Bending Spoons staff in Europe.
How many other fissurings like this will we see, in the coming years?