Bending Spoons agrees to buy Airtable for $1.28 billion
No-code platform’s valuation collapses from 2021 peak as cash deal resets expectations, Superagent push puts AI orchestration inside a consolidation playbook
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Bending Spoons agrees to buy Airtable for $1.28 billion in cash, the Italian software consolidator makes its first deal since listing last month, a no-code database built for teams becomes another cost-cutting target as AI orchestration turns into the product.
The buyer says the price implies an Airtable valuation of about $2.25 billion once net cash is included, according to TechCrunch. That is a long way from Airtable’s peak valuation of more than $11 billion during 2021, and below the roughly $4 billion level its shares traded at on secondary markets earlier this year. The markdown is not just a verdict on one company’s growth; it is a repricing of “future platform” narratives now that enterprises want automation they can audit and finance teams want software budgets that behave like budgets.
Airtable is not a small asset. The company, founded in 2013, says it serves more than 500,000 organisations and counts 80% of the Fortune 100 as customers, with annual recurring revenue of roughly $480 million as of June 2026 and growth of over 20% year on year. But that revenue base also makes it legible to a firm like Bending Spoons, which has built a reputation for buying well-known products at a discount, reducing staff, streamlining roadmaps and pushing for profitability. The playbook has been applied to consumer and creator tools; bringing it to a workflow product used inside large companies raises a different question: how much “innovation” in productivity software is feature expansion, and how much is simply rearranging who pays for integration.
The timing matters because Airtable has been repositioning itself around AI. In January it launched Superagent, described as an orchestration platform for teams of AI agents. That puts Airtable in the same crowded lane as cloud providers, model labs and enterprise software vendors that want to sit between a company’s data and the models that act on it. The prize is not the chatbot interface but the control plane: the layer that decides which systems an agent can touch, which logs are retained, and which vendor gets blamed when an automated action breaks a business process.
Bending Spoons went public in July at an $18 billion valuation, and this is its first acquisition since. Airtable’s CEO Howie Liu framed the deal as a way to accelerate the company’s mission, while Bending Spoons’ founder Luca Ferrai praised Airtable’s product, TechCrunch reports. The hard numbers in the announcement tell the same story more plainly: a platform once priced for hypergrowth is being bought for cash by a firm known for making software run lean.