Analysis
Bending Spoons made its first acquisition since going public last month, agreeing to buy workplace database startup Airtable for $1.28 billion in cash -- a deal that captures, in one number, how far 2021-era software valuations have fallen back to earth. Airtable was valued at more than $11 billion at its peak during the zero-rate boom; this deal prices it at roughly an 88% discount to that mark, even though the underlying business has kept growing the entire time.
The Growth Behind the Markdown
The growth is real. Airtable's annual recurring revenue has climbed more than 20% year-over-year to approximately $480 million as of June 2026, and the company counts more than 500,000 organizations as customers, including 80% of the Fortune 100. That's not a company in distress -- it's a company whose 2021 valuation was simply disconnected from any revenue multiple that survived the subsequent correction, even as its actual business metrics stayed healthy.
The Bending Spoons Playbook
Bending Spoons' business model is exactly built for this moment: acquire well-known software brands trading at a steep discount to their private-market peak, cut costs, and run them as profitable, durable cash generators rather than growth-at-all-costs venture bets. The Italian company, which itself went public at an $18 billion valuation last month, has previously applied this playbook to consumer apps like Evernote and Meetup -- Airtable is its first swing at genuine enterprise software with Fortune 100 distribution already built in.
The deal is also a useful data point for the broader SaaS-multiple correction story that's been playing out since 2022: plenty of companies that raised at eye-watering 2021 valuations are still growing at healthy clips, but the exit prices available to them now assume a much more conservative revenue multiple than their original cap tables were built around.
What to watch: whether Bending Spoons runs Airtable with the same cost-cutting playbook it's applied to consumer products, and whether that approach works as cleanly on an enterprise product with deep Fortune 100 integrations as it has on more disposable consumer apps.
