Bending Spoons makes first post-IPO acquisition with $1.3B Airtable deal
live.euronext.com112 points by riffraff 3 days ago
112 points by riffraff 3 days ago
I had some thoughts but for context.
Basically, widely reported Airtable's 2026 reported ARR was close to $500M. they sold at a ~3x multiple assuming it went flat/down~~. They had raised $1.4B (total latest around 770M) in funding I am not sure for what?? and had ~1B in cash (according to some online sources)??
Now I have no idea what this is even about, maybe all investors wanted out?
I strongly suspect a big chunk of their revenue was enterprise where it was probably used as a CRUD app / Access replacement with proper controls. That's low hanging fruit for Claude and friends, so their renewals/ARR must have started dropping off and they sold while the selling was good.
I suspect most enterprises aren’t Claude-ing up in house replacements for tools like this, for the same reason most enterprises are using cloud providers rather than managing their own data centers. A big part of what they’re paying for is to make it “Somebody Else’s Problem” for something they don’t consider a core competetency.
That's a really interesting theory! Thanks for surfacing it.
By the way, Grist is Airtable-like and has RBAC down to every row and cell, enforced live. And you can self-host it. Check it out: https://www.getgrist.com/airtable-alternative-self-hosted/
(FYI, I work at Grist.)
My (semi-educated) guess: it's about the quality, not quantity, of that revenue. If I opened their books, I expect to see lots of SMB customers with low deal sizes and non-trivial churn, non-sticky product usage, not many large enterprises signing up, and low NRR. Add a high customer acquisition cost in an undifferentiated space to complete the picture.
I didn't understand why a CRUD app (yes, with lots of integrations and bells and whistles) would need to raise more $1B+. I think most of that went into GTM, not into product development.
(Addition: Airtable had $900M in the bank at the time of acquisition so they spent "only" $400M, but still, my guess is that a lot of that went into GTM.)
Eyeing Wikipedia it seems like it sold for about raised capital. Probably very little product value but some b2b contracts to milk?
Probably they are getting eaten by new AI integrations and the numbers don’t look good.
It’s strange, I thought they were in pole position to integrate into vibe coded apps with bolt and co. Maybe be a strategy issue?
It's used by non technical people so not sure AI is the competition.
Perhaps Notion and all the project planning apps like Linear, ClickUp, Asana?
> It's used by non technical people so not sure AI is the competition.
I mean yes but most of them are vibe coding apps now
> Perhaps Notion and all the project planning apps like Linear, ClickUp, Asana?
Most probably, but their market share must have free fall for such valuation
you'd be amazed how little people are vibe coding their apps to have alternatives. I mean i recently did for a club, but other clubs are still buying the SaaS-solution for 250$ a year, while having more members and i'd assume at least 1 technical person, that knows what they are doing.
that cant be right if so they got an excellent deal ...$1BN cash (!)
Deals of this type are usually cash free and debt free. The cash went to the shareholders. Hence the implied valuation of $2.5B.
ARR has always been a bullshit number but it is an especially bullshit number nowadays because AI has destroyed software margins.
> AI has destroyed software margins.
Nobody wants to talk about or reveal the AI or software margins.
Will cause everyone to panic once they see how low the margins are getting year over year.
I guess in the sense that if your goal is to sell, you'd optimize on revenues. That being said, when I look at an income statement I am usually more suspect of costs than revenues.
If these numbers are remotely true, there's either a crucial number missing or investors are utter idiots who forced this sale. Won't be surprised if it's the latter.
Assuming M&A deals take at least a few months to close, this acquisition was probably set in motion around April, when SaaS sentiment was near rock bottom and cash-flow machines like Cloudflare, Adobe, and Snowflake were getting crushed simply because Anthropic announced something.
I think the revenues must have taken a hit or growth was getting harder, otherwise this doesn't make sense also IV is 2.25B so assuming cash went to investors + some employee equity. I don't think other than early investors and founders others made much of anything.
But if the revenues were hit this might be a home run, given AI could replace all of airtable in about a weekend e2e, but then again a competent team of 2-3 devs could have done it over a few weeks, it wasn't ever really about the product quality.
My condolences to all the Airtable users, who are about to get fleeced now, they should consider moving to anything else, even vibe coded slop might be ok.
After they acquired Meetup.com, subscription prices skyrocketed while nothing useful was added to the product.
29€ a month just to host a meetup page with RSVPs.
Was anything else needed to be added to the product?
I was fine with meetup.com in its original form: it had the community of people wanting to go to events, it let you share your events to these people. People showed up to events.
And the price you pay is for you to access their users. If you think it's just an RSVP page, vibe code one in 5 minutes and try and see how many people will show up to your events.
It's a modern product development failure to think that you must be adding new features all the time. "Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away."
Did users leave for other products/solutions?
yes, _every_ event I go uses Luma or something else nowadays.
Cool that there is something else. There was also EventBrite but I guess that got enshittified as well. Anyway my question was more in the realm of: if people stays, their play works. Not justifying the modus operandi, just stating that there is indeed space for Bending Spoons' MO.
Not all the cool hipster SV tech startups end up being a planetary success, some of them end up in this zombie state.
I've been researching the alternatives as I've been really.annoyed by the Meetup.com enshittification.
Any other platforms besides Luma you hear about? I know some lean on WhatsApp, some tried to use FB or even LinkedIn events but these are really made for different use cases.
And yet, with all the promise of vibecoding and AI, nobody has created a clone that undercuts it in price.
$725M@11B Series F 2021 Dec
$270M@5.8B Series E 2021 Mar
$185M@2.6B Series D 2020 Sep
$100M@1.1B Series C 2018 Nov
$52M@152M Series B 2018 Mar
>Bending Spoons said Airtable's current net cash position implies an equity value of about $2.25 billion.
Bending Spoons must have amazing negotiaters to strike such a bargain.
We should send them to Iran to negotiate the peace deal.
I don't think this is quite accurate. The main question is how much revenue does Sortable bring in each year and after all expenses, how much cash flow does Airtable generate for its owners every year? I am positive it is nowhere near a billion dollars a year. If we roughly say it is annual recurring revenue of USD 0.5B a year, now the question is how much can bending spoon choke airtable neck forcing it to reduce expenses without meaningfully reducing revenue.
> We should send them to Iran to negotiate the peace deal.
I laughed so hard. But I mean seriously...
Bending Spoons is where products go to die.
Maybe going against the grain but I think their product philosophy is actually really interesting. They basically just buy the database. Then throw out the crappily built product, with years of tech debt and cruft, and rebuild it leanly, with a small team, low overheads, and ruthlessly optimise for efficiency, and amortise shared in-house resources across the product portfolio.
There's a strong logic to that.
In other words, the private equity sales pitch. You left out the bit about jacking up the price and milking customers for every penny until their contracts expire.
> Then throw out the crappily built product, with years of tech debt and cruft, and rebuild it leanly
Which products have they rebuilt? I mostly hear about them selling the existing product at a higher price while reducing the size of the development team.
I'd rather Bending Spoons than Broadcom. I can still use Komoot but I can't even access my license codes from VMWare.
Ive been happy with all the improvements they are making to Komoot do far.
I used it this we and I found it's really worst than one year ago. In detail: - It was blocking my phone, and one time I had to restart it - It's VERY hard now to find my planned trips
But maybe this is because I do a very basic usage. Uninstalled, though.
I'm suprised, as nothing was changed around saved trips or collections. Same UX as always there.
I'm a heavy user; I use it to plan 3-week-long trips and another month-long trip every year. It has improved, and they do a ton of user interviews to improve it. So far I've been happy.
I'm not happy they fired the old team, but I put that on the sellers and I don't know what was going on there or the company's finances.
Expect entshittification of Airtable after the acquisition.
Airtable has got too expensive for all the weird limitations you end up either writing tons of weird hacks around or paying another sass product to fix for you because airtable don't want to engineer a solution.
Can't say it'll be hugely missed whatever they do at this point.
This goes for almost all software.
'entshittification' in software is pretty much almost a standard.
Software and businesses that goes through these stages:
Venture Capital, Private Equity, Acquisitions, Ads / Sponsors, Raising Prices due to competition, etc.
Always get enshittified.
>This goes for almost all software. 'entshittification' in software
It's really every category of commercial activity. Restaurants food quality, cable tv channels, movie sequels, home appliances, airline travel, theme parks, etc.
For years, I had a particular local HVAC company do my twice-a-year maintenance on my air conditioner and furnace. I liked the owner and he had a crew of older experienced guys that knew what they were doing. He then sold the business to another owner and he completely changed out the crew to kids that barely look 18 years old. The young inexperienced techs didn't have the skills to diagnose anything on their own. They always had to phone the home office and use their smartphones to send video/photos of what they're looking at to the more knowledgeable technician at the office. That way, the senior guy sitting at the desk can walk them through what to do next. That's when I realized the financial game the new owner was playing: hire new kids that just completed their 3-month HVAC tech certificate for cheap wages but still charge the same high prices that the old owner was charging for experienced techs. And only pay for one expensive senior tech back at the office to be a "shared resource" for all the clueless techs out in the field. That type of "enshittification" didn't require venture capital, or private equity, or ads. The common pattern of degrading a product or service has the same thing in common ... humans.
The vast majority of enshittification is not caused by private equity or ads.
> It's really every category of commercial activity.
I'm not going to defend capital's ability to ruin things, but this is framing is not helpful. Enshittification as it was described by Cory Doctorow, who invented the term, requires two additional things:
1. A platform that tries to attract both producers and consumers. Amazon is the canonical example. The platform does what it can to attract enough consumers that producers have to use the platform to reach them. Then it squeezes out the value to the producers (e.g., hiking acquisition fees, etc.; competing with them and underselling them with cheaper alternatives). The final step is to destroy the value to the consumer, by degrading quality and increasing price. By this time, neither producers nor consumers have many levers to fight back.
2. Non-physical pricing levers. Enshittification requires the ability to observe consumer behavior and jigger pricing at great speed. We see this in Amazon again; ridesharing apps introduced surge pricing; ads are priced according to what platforms know about you. In a physical store, the logistical cost of changing the price of goods is nontrivial, so we don't see the same sort of gaming there.
Enshittification is a novel and illuminating concept, so we need to be careful not to let it turn into some vague "things got worse" meaning.
>Enshittification as it was described by Cory Doctorow, who invented the term,
Cory Docotor didn't invent the term. He just made it more popular. Others used it at least 9 years before he did to describe "web design", and 3 years prior to describe the U.K. : https://www.oed.com/dictionary/enshittification_n?tab=meanin...
>Enshittification is a novel and illuminating concept, so we need to be careful not to let it turn into
The gp I replied to already used "enshittification" in a more general way to describe "almost all software". Most software out there is not the platforms that have the 2 factors you listed. I was just going going along with the conversation.
As far as policing the usage of "enshittification", you've got an uphill battle because people like the way it sounds and tend to use it as a spicy word to talk about anything getting worse. They're not going to research what Cory Doctorow was talking about and doublecheck to see if matches exactly what he was trying to describe. E.g. See it used to complain about "public libraries", "policing", "tech jobs", etc: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=enshittification
Private equity firms are buying profitable local businesses all over the US, including HVAC, plumbing, auto techs, storage, etc. So it’s possible that this case of enshittification actually WAS caused private equity in your example.
In my case, the new HVAC owner is just another local resident that had an existing local area HVAC shop. Nothing to do with any private equity rollup.
Enshitification is a problem when the power structures are not in the user's favour.
It's also a byproduct of the most successful user acquisition model to be honest.
Getting users is hard, especially on the Internet where your audience is global, and competition is fierce. Word of mouth or user advocacy has always been the best cost-to-value marketing tool.
So starting out by offering things for free or at a loss has been the go-to strategy forever.
But (as we all know) that's not sustainable, so there's pretty much nowhere to go but down, from a value-to-user perspective.
I have a lot of personal stuff in Airtable. It's really nice software but the company has struggled. Omni, their AI agent was terrible, and yet the founders have doubled down on agents with Hyperagents (nee Superagents).
I'm sure Notion DBs ate their lunch, but Coda had the best document database integration I've seen, but they got bought by Superhuman.
This entire market space is going to be messy for a while.
Coda got acquired by Grammarly who then installed Shishir Mehrotra (Coda CEO) as CEO of Grammarly. They then acquired Superhuman Mail and renamed the whole thing Superhuman. They also acquired Rows to bring a formal spreadsheet into the mix to add to their Coda tables and productivity suite. (Well played.)
I was very surprised to see Airtable sold for reportedly less than what they raised and had assumed AI tailwinds (easy database GUI) would benefit them well. Presumably, this was insufficient to overcome enterprise revenue headwinds and a chilly SaaS financing market.
I do wonder how this might have played differently had their product and API been better engineered as a database for developers through faster read/write and data scale... unnecessary in PLG-focused pre-AI world, but an interesting avenue for agentic growth nonetheless.
Tough break for the Airtable team. It was a great product and I have recommended it often to small business owners over the years.
Correction: It looks like they sold for more than raised: https://x.com/haridigresses/status/2084825945609802079?s=20
You may want to start looking at alternatives. I work at Grist https://getgrist.com, AMA.
Bending Spoons strategy can be summarized in the following plan:
- Make offers so low that - if anyone were to accept the deal, they're desperate/greedy enough to take it - hike price and limit features - people who do not have the capacity to switch will bear the cost - bleed out remaining customers
If it works, it works. They're basically betting against the amount of business depth that exists in the world
>Make offers so low...
Yes, all the company execs at Airtable and the VCs and their lawyers and finance guys and advisors are stupid and were incapable of fielding rival offers...
Businesses tend to sell for their market value at that point in time.
Bummer. Airtable's a killer product and I've been using and evangelizing it for nearly 10 years at this point. Built whole side projects around it (and its API), plus organized a ton of personal information. I've made some custom integrations too which have just kept working without maintenance for years. I've got fairly regular backups of all my data, but still. Hurts my heart a little.
Best case scenario it keeps working without totally jacking up the prices. But also starting to think about long-term alternatives. BaseRow seems reasonable, as does spinning all of my many bases into a single big Django monolith (something I've had in the back of my head for while anyway). But it's been nice not having to micro manage this service. Pretty good mobile app, too. Enjoyed it while it lasted, I guess!
Why not simply rebuild what you need with Claude? Airtable seems to me as a prototyping product. Once you know what you want, formulate it as product objectives and ask Claude how it could be implemented from scratch. Dont even give it any ideas about Django. Just ask it what technologies are sensible for what you need, read and verify its answers, lock in a stack, plan your features and implement them.
You will be surprised how many things you could not fix in Airtable or where awkward workarounds can be solved much more elegantly if you (or Claude) consider them straight in the design phase. Just make sure to start with your objectives and _maaaybe_ desired workflows to avoid biasing Claude too much and that you end up rebuilding Airtable.
Airtable is worth "just" $1.3B? I see (or used to see) it almost everywhere; why such a low valuation?
I’ve always felt like their money went into marketing, not actual capabilities. It still feels like a Fisher-Price tier platform imo.
That's an interesting perspective..
I feel like everyone I know/knew who was really into Airtable was pretty sophisticated and used it for complex data wrangling that was beyond the typical tools they had access to.
But they were often solo operators for that data because whatever they were wrangling wasn't worth putting into a database or investing in more robust tools (from a company perspective)..
So perhaps you are correct.
People are reacting like Bending Spoons is going to make Airtable worse, whereas in fact being acquired by bending spoons is already the indicated of things being worse than ever. Which may be a little premature for Airtable but definitely not unexpected. As to what will bending spoons do with it - does anyone know (or care) what did they do with Evernote, or AOL?
Airtable felt stuck for a long before that, now is just the moment to remind ourselves not to be stuck with it.
i gotta say, there were some bumps post-acquistion, but evernote is still going strong. not too AI-sloppy, a few new features here and there, reliability still aok. they were worse pre-acquisition imx.
Stripe about to acquire OpenRouter for $10B, and Airtable is only ~1/10th of OpenRouter???
The difference is an aggressively growing and profitable business vs. stagnant-at-best-degrowth-at-worst business.
What is the best open source alternatives of Airtable?
Look at Grist.
You maybe justly concerned for it being an open source project that is backed by one small company that sells hosted plans.
The difference is that Grist is a core part of the French Government’s open source web applications La Suite
Second Grist it is very cool we use a lot of it. You can run python as a column/ cell and it doesn't have a lot of the limitations of Airtable. Usage tiers are ridiculously large. Free api. I am almost hoping they charge more so they stay in business.
Thanks for the mention (I work at Grist)! We want to stay in business, indeed. How much shall we charge? :)
Honestly the "charge by data" is probably missing some things. We have quite a few users on the free tier. I found out my ops guys were optimizing the data to keep on the free tier because it would jump from zero to [something still reasonable] but would be a multiple of seats. They would pay you SOMETHING but the big jump to MORE seemed too much for them lol.
They are on Grist by my recommendation after searching for tools. I just checked in on it after 6 months and they have built their entire manufacturing process management on it... Good stuff.
By the way, Grist has a very good Airtable migration tool. https://www.getgrist.com/airtable-alternative-self-hosted/
It brings over column types, references, attachments, and simple formulas intact. Even brings over choice/select colors!
As others said, baserow is a good one. Pretty easy to self-host with something like https://malmo.network/store/baserow (founder here)
I've heard good things about https://teable.ai/ for airtable-like flexibility. With more standardized CRM scenarios I'm going to try https://twenty.com/ with the next opportunity
Bending Spoons list of taking over companies is huge:
2026: Airtable
2025: Eventbrite, AOL, Vimeo, Brightcove, Komoot
2024: WeTransfer, Issuu, Hopin, Meetup, Mosaic Group
2023: Evernote
2022: Filmic Pro
2021: Remini
2018: Splice
Well, you all know what this means... RIP Airtable
That’s a bold move in a vibe coding world.
Kind of amazing Airtable couldn’t turn vibe coding in Airtable itself into something worth charging for.
But they have had a distinct lack of imagination for a very long time.
On top of that, isn't Bending Spoons famous for enshittify anything they buy to squeeze every single cent they can? Meaning that their fame would push even more companies/people to do a vibecoded replacement with just the features they need.
Their MO is switching to maintenance mode and running services with skeleton crew. I am not sure if it will work in area exposed to AI, where everyone is by now used to monthly updates and quarterly product releases.
There is a lot of inertia to overcome to migrate away from a product like this. My guess is they will be able to milk this for a long time.
Bending Spoons are all in on AI development. Look at Komoot’s release cadence but also the skyrocketing number of bug reports in the Komoot subreddit.
Doesn't matter, has to last and pump the bending stock for the next years, products and money don't matter.
I was sad when Airtable bought Airplane.dev because that was a dirty move they pulled. Now let’s see if that’s how they get treated.
Airplane was an awesome product, but I think that was basically just an aquihire. I don't think Airplane had built a sustainable business.
Yeah they folded it in 30 days. It was most definitely a hiring poach thing. We ended up with Windmill.dev
Bending Spoons IPO raised $1.68bn so taking away IPO fees and they have in effect spent all of it on 1 acquisition
Super silly of me to ask but how does Bending Spoons make money in all of this? Is it the "fire all American devs and save costs with cheaper Italians" schtick or is there something else?
I don't see how Airtable makes money on its own.
Having read their IPO prospectus, my reading - They buy a company which they feel has a sticky product for its loyal userbase and then integrate as many of its common services into its in-house platform e.g. data
They then fire nearly all of the existing new companies staff and think of all the ways they can maximally monetise the existing userbase. Growing the product via investing in it isn't a priority, revenue stream is.
They get a lot of stick, but in fairness they are up front about their business model; they don't hide the fact that they are going to fire most people, unlike traditional private equity firms who make false promises.
That goes a long way yes. Most of these products have built up to hundreds or maybe thousands of engineers over the years, and if you can keep it going with just a handful in Italy, that is a serious cost optimisation.
Find product that users like and can be difficult to switch away from, cut operating costs to the bone, and jack up prices. Ideally the money you extract from the remaining customers pays for the acquisition plus generates a profit. Someone in a previous thread compared it to a perpetual bond with fluctuating payouts or a royalty stream, the discounted future earnings eventually converge to 0.
The same thing Broadcom is doing with VMware.
They look for companies which got fat on free money with impossible valuations which are dead ducks. The free money period ended so they can't raise more money and if they do it will be a substantial down valuation so investors won't approve it as it would cristalise a loss on their portfolio.
These companies all pay insanely high silicon valley wages and deliver very little actual product development velocity for the wage costs involved.
The founders don't have the b**s to do the necessary haircuts themselves so they sell. Bending spoons takes the reputation hit that the founder should have taken and makes severe cuts.
BS then rationalises the roadmap, and either keeps it alive or invests into it depending on expected return.
Nothing particularly revolutionary other than they are an execution machine.
They also hike the price so significantly most people stop using it. See meetup.com for example.
Feels like the founding team is moving on to a different product entirely, they were building something called hyperagent and focusing all of their efforts on
Any suggestion to migrate away from Airtable?
Possibly grist https://www.getgrist.com/blog/grist-v-airtable/ ?
FYI, Grist has a very good Airtable migration tool. Brings over column types, references, simple formulas, attachments etc: https://www.getgrist.com/airtable-alternative-self-hosted/
It depends what you need, there are many options these days. https://chatgpt.com/?hints=search&q=Any%20suggestion%20to%20...?
"Bending Spoons"... never heard about them until now... let' do some research!:
Wikipedia:
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bending_Spoons)
>"Based in Milan, the company acquires products with existing product‑market fit[4][5] (such as AOL, Eventbrite, Evernote, komoot, Meetup, Tractive, Vimeo, and WeTransfer) and manages them for long-term ownership, often increasing revenue and lowering expenses (including by reducing headcount).[6][7] The company employs full-stack developers to rewrite acquired codebases using artificial intelligence, proprietary platform tools, and open-source software (often Python, FastAPI, and TypeScript).[8][9]"
Ah!
So they're kind of the equivalent of a
special kind of Private Equity firm
that specifically purchases/manages/improves: Commerical websites, Apps, SaaS'es and other Digital/Software products that already have many users/customers (aka "Product-Market Fit" in business parlance...)
Although, arguably, Microsoft, while never called a "Private Equity" firm, sort of did all of that first, with other tech companies, in earlier decades!
Well, wait a second now...
If memory serves me, then actually Computer Associates did all of that (for software mostly for the Mainframe / Minicomputer markets and related!) even earlier than Microsoft, probably about a decade or so earlier than Microsoft!
Anyway, interesting article!
Meetup users were sunk-cost locked in. Airtable’s buyers already have easy alternatives… so that price-hike playbook carries real churn risk imo.
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