(2026-08-04) Breaking Bending Spoons Is Buying Airtable

Evan Armstrong: Bending Spoons is Buying Airtable. 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.)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

Aug05: Obsidian is making it easy to migrate Airtable data to Bases.