Bending Spoons, the Milan-based technology holding company known for buying and rebuilding established digital products, agreed on July 30, 2026 to acquire Airtable in an all-cash deal worth $2.25 billion in equity value — or $1.285 billion in enterprise value once Airtable’s roughly $965 million net cash position is factored in. Airtable, founded in 2013 by Howie Liu, Andrew Ofstad, and Emmett Nicholas, pioneered the category of no-code, spreadsheet-meets-database software that combined the accessibility of a spreadsheet with the structure and power of a real relational database. The company now serves more than 500,000 organizations, including 80% of the Fortune 100, and reports $480 million in annual recurring revenue growing more than 20% year over year.
The number that stands out in this deal isn’t the price tag — it’s the trajectory. Airtable raised a $735 million Series F in December 2021 at an $11 billion valuation, near the peak of the era’s software valuation bubble. This acquisition prices the company at roughly 2.7 times its current annual recurring revenue, a fraction of the multiple investors were willing to pay four and a half years ago. It’s one of the clearest, most concrete examples yet of just how far enterprise SaaS valuations have reset since 2021 — a real, once-celebrated unicorn selling for barely a fifth of its previous peak valuation, despite genuinely healthy underlying revenue growth.
Bending Spoons’ Buy-and-Hold Playbook
This is Bending Spoons’ latest in a growing string of acquisitions of established, well-known digital brands: AOL in January 2026, Eventbrite in March 2026, Vimeo for $1.38 billion in 2025, plus Evernote and WeTransfer in prior years. The company’s strategy is distinct from typical private equity roll-ups — rather than acquiring, cutting costs, and flipping assets, Bending Spoons says it holds companies long-term, restructures operations, and reinvests in product development. The company went public on Nasdaq on July 1, 2026, and as of March had over 500 million monthly active users and 9 million paying customers across its portfolio — Airtable now becomes its highest-profile enterprise software acquisition to date, giving the company real exposure to the B2B workflow-tools category for the first time.
Why Airtable Sold Rather Than Kept Fighting for a Higher Valuation
Airtable CEO Howie Liu framed the deal as being about resources and commitment rather than a forced exit: the partnership “gives us the resources and long-term commitment Airtable needs to pursue that vision” of becoming “the AI-native platform of the future.” That framing matters — a company with healthy 20%+ revenue growth and genuine enterprise penetration wasn’t forced to sell out of desperation, but the reality of trying to raise fresh venture capital at anywhere near an $11 billion valuation in 2026’s more disciplined funding environment, against increasing competitive pressure from AI-native workflow tools built from scratch, made a well-capitalized long-term owner a more attractive path than continuing to chase a valuation the market clearly wasn’t going to support again. The deal is expected to close later in 2026, pending regulatory approval, with Airtable continuing to operate independently until then.
What This Means for Philippine Founders
Airtable’s trajectory — from celebrated 2021 unicorn to a 2026 acquisition at a fraction of that value — is a genuinely useful case study for Philippine SaaS founders navigating the same reset in investor expectations that’s played out globally since 2021. It’s a reminder that a strong, growing, profitable business can still see its valuation reset dramatically when the broader funding environment shifts, and that isn’t necessarily a sign of failure — Airtable is being acquired at a real premium to a reasonable revenue multiple by a buyer explicitly committed to long-term investment, which is a materially better outcome than the shutdowns and fire sales that hit many weaker companies from the same 2021 vintage. For Philippine founders who raised at aggressive 2021-era valuations and are now navigating down rounds or acquisition conversations at lower prices, Airtable’s example is worth internalizing: a disciplined, well-resourced acquirer willing to invest for the long term can be a genuinely good outcome, even when the headline number is a fraction of a prior peak — and it’s often a far better path than holding out for a valuation the market has already made clear it won’t support again.
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