BREAKING: Bending Spoons is Buying Airtable
The once SaaS darling cries uncle—and keeps its newest AI bet out of the deal.
At its peak, Airtable was known as a SaaS company that was doing “everything right.” I had multiple conversations with founders, talking about how the business was making an incredible product. In 2021, it raised capital at a post-money valuation of $11.735 billion.
This morning the firm announced it had agreed to be acquired by Bending Spoons for an enterprise value of $1.285 billion.
The company’s metrics aren’t even all that terrible:
Current ARR: approximately $480 million
ARR growth: more than 20%
Implied EV/ARR multiple: approximately 2.7×
Those metrics merited an 80%+ decline from its 2021 valuation. So today I want to talk about what the hell happened here (and why there is a fascinating spinout from Airtable that I’m not sure people have fully noticed yet.)
What Airtable actually sells
Airtable is a relational database with a top hat. It makes that database as friendly and accessible as a spreadsheet. (This sounds simple, but is actually quite a hard product to pull off.) To upsell it beyond hobbyists, the company would bundle in the usual stuff like permissions, integrations, and internal application building.
Think of it like this. You know that clunky spreadsheet that your team built, that has gotten so big and unwieldy that opening it makes your MacBook beg for mercy? Airtable fixes that by giving you a more performant database and then doing a no-code app builder on top of that.
If you think back to 2021, building an internal application required either:
Hiring engineers who would rather be making something customer-facing
Buying a specialized SaaS product that is overpriced and sucks
Airtable represented an appealing third option of just building and maintaining it yourself. Unfortunately, AI created a fourth option of just describing the application in plain English and letting an agent build it. Tools like Lovable, Replit, Claude Code, and ChatGPT can increasingly generate everything you need besides the database itself. For a small dataset, a company can use Notion or something inexpensive. If the application gets too big, your AI agent can connect you to Snowflake, Databricks, or a host of other options.
In this new world, what is the point of Airtable? The company’s original interface once eliminated the need to understand databases. Coding agents now eliminate the need to understand Airtable.
To be fair to Airtable, there is a reason why this business is still worth something. Coding agents do not magically eliminate permissions, security, backups, etc. So there is still some wiggle room for Airtable to thrive.
And to be even more fair to Airtable, it actually saw this future coming.
It missed the AI wave anyway.
Starting in 2021, right around the time it raised its last mega-round, it began to position itself as an app builder. Then in 2023, as an AI-powered one.
November 2021: Interface Designer, marketed as a complete app builder for enterprises.
October 2022: Repositioned as the Connected Apps Platform.
May 2023: Announced a next-generation application platform with AI-powered workflows.
July 2024: Launched Cobuilder, which generated applications from prompts.
June 2025: Declared an “AI-native Airtable” and a “refounding moment”.
January 2026: Launched Superagent, a standalone AI research agent that produces polished reports and presentations.
February 2026: Announced Hyperagent, a platform for building and managing autonomous AI workers across business tools.
The failure of Airtable was one of execution. For years now, the company has been attempting to integrate LLMs, but it hasn’t made a lick of difference. It guessed correctly about the rough shape of the future and yet still failed to reach it before faster AI-native competitors collapsed the value of basic no-code app building.
The company’s ideal destination was probably a governed Snowflake–Lovable hybrid, where businesses could store trusted operational data underneath, and then generate applications and agents on top. They just couldn’t get there in time.
Thus enters Bending Spoons. It will deploy their usual playbook of firing everyone, raising prices on existing customers who have too much data to easily port over, and milking this thing until it is dry. (For more on the Italian conglomerate read my analysis here.)
However, the SEC filing for the transaction had a weird detail:
“Prior to entering into the Purchase Agreement, Seller and its affiliates implemented a reorganization pursuant to which Seller became the sole holder of the Shares, and assets and liabilities relating to the “Hyperagent” business line were transferred by the Company to Hyperagent Inc.”
So Bending Spoons is buying Airtable’s database, customers, workflows, and recurring revenue but someone else is keeping the agents. The company still had $965M in cash on hand, so it didn’t have to do this. The team could’ve done the hard work of transforming the company themselves. Most likely the Airtable founder wants to pursue Hyperagent as his next project and doesn’t want to do the required thing of laying off the majority of his company. So, bring on the Italians!
Airtable will, in one form or another, survive. The more important question is whether the rest of SaaS can survive the transition Airtable failed to complete.
