Airtable Didn’t Fail. Its 2021 Valuation Did.
Everyone knows an Airtable person. The one who has somehow moved their entire working life into a base, with the company roadmap, content calendar, customer tracker and probably a few personal projects all living side by side. Airtable has always had that kind of user. The people who love the product really love it.
So for those people, it may come as a surprise that last week Bending Spoons agreed to acquire Airtable for $1.285 billion in enterprise value. With roughly $965 million of net cash, the implied equity value is approximately $2.25 billion. That is a long way from the $11.7 billion valuation Airtable reached after its final funding round in 2021. It would be easy to look at that gap and call the company a failure, but that would be a lazy conclusion.
Bending Spoons is buying a company with approximately $480 million of ARR, growing more than 20% year over year, used by more than 500,000 organizations and 80% of the Fortune 100. Airtable is also free cash flow positive and reportedly generating around $100 million annually. By almost any reasonable standard, this is a fantastic software business - the problem was the price.
The $11.7 Billion Number
Airtable raised $735 million in December 2021 at an $11 billion valuation. Interest rates were near zero, capital was abundant and investors were willing to pay extraordinary prices for future growth. Airtable had the product love, organic distribution (they were primarily a product-led-growth organization) and a real case to make it one of the most compelling software companies of the era.
Early investors were right. They backed a company that went from an idea to nearly half a billion dollars of recurring revenue and became embedded inside some of the largest companies in the world. Freestyle Capital, one of Airtable’s earliest investors, is still expected to generate roughly a 30-50x MOIC on its original investment.
The issue was investors entering much later. At $11.7 billion, Airtable no longer needed to become a great company. At that point, it needed to become a gargantuan, generational one. The business kept growing, but not quickly enough to justify a price set during one of the most aggressive periods in venture history.
Even the commonly cited decline from $11.7 billion to $1.285 billion exaggerates the comparison somewhat. The first number is an equity valuation and the second is enterprise value. Including Airtable’s cash, the implied equity value today is closer to $2.25 billion.
Still a painful markdown, but also an important distinction. Airtable did not lose $10 billion of some permanent, intrinsic value. Investors assigned a very high price to its future in 2021, and the future turned out to be worth less than they expected.
What Happens When Growth Slows
We spend a lot of time talking about the zero-to-one journey because it is where much of the magic of venture happens. Someone sees a problem, builds something people want and turns it into a company that did not exist before. Airtable is now at a very different stage.
Once a software company has hundreds of millions of dollars in recurring revenue and a deeply embedded customer base, the operating question begins to change. The skills required to discover a product and grow at triple digits are not necessarily the same ones required to run a mature software company for the next decade.
Airtable itself went through this transition. It initially grew through a heavily product-led motion, with individual users and teams bringing the product into companies. Over time it moved further into enterprise sales. By 2022, enterprise represented the majority of revenue, was growing more than 100% and had net dollar retention of roughly 170% (which naturally had growth equity investors salivating).
Those are remarkable numbers, but moving upmarket also tends to create a larger organization. Sales teams grow, implementation becomes more complicated, product roadmaps expand and more internal infrastructure gets built around the business. Airtable subsequently went through multiple rounds of layoffs as growth slowed and the company adjusted to a different market.
This is where Bending Spoons becomes an interesting buyer.
Its model resembles private equity as much as traditional technology M&A. It buys established digital products with strong brands and loyal users, then focuses relentlessly on efficiency, monetization and product velocity. Across its portfolio, it has cut costs aggressively, consolidated functions and used AI to increase output per employee - and airtable appears well suited to that playbook.
Back to the Product
There is also a chance that Bending Spoons pushes Airtable closer to some of the characteristics that made it great in the first place.
Airtable grew because people loved the product. Teams adopted it, built increasingly important workflows inside it and spread it organically across organizations. That distribution engine created genuine product evangelists in a category where most enterprise software is tolerated rather than loved.
AI makes that installed base even more interesting. If smaller teams can now ship more product, automate internal work and support large customer bases with fewer people, then mature software businesses with strong retention can become substantially more profitable without needing to rediscover hypergrowth.
Airtable has already started moving in that direction. Its new Superagent product lets users orchestrate teams of AI agents, while the company has increasingly reorganized its own development around AI. Bending Spoons has been even more aggressive in applying AI internally.
At $1.285 billion of enterprise value against roughly $480 million of ARR, Bending Spoons does not need Airtable to become a $20 billion company for this deal to work. It needs Airtable’s customers to keep loving the product while the organization becomes significantly more efficient. That actually seems like a fairly compelling bet.
The Hardest Part May be the People
The biggest question might be what happens inside Airtable after the acquisition. Employees who joined when the company was valued near $12 billion may see far less value from their equity than they once expected. We cannot say from the outside that employee shares were wiped out because, of course, Airtable’s cap table, liquidation preferences and individual grants are not public. Outcomes will vary dramatically depending on when someone joined, what they own and their strike price.
The more important issue for Bending Spoons may be retention. A top engineer at Airtable has plenty of alternatives, particularly in the current AI market. When an acquisition signals that aggressive restructuring is likely and much of the upside associated with the old valuation has disappeared, keeping the people responsible for the best parts of the product becomes harder.
That tension matters because Airtable’s cult following was built by people who understood what made the product special. There is plenty of room to make the company more efficient, but the best version of this acquisition preserves the product culture while removing the organizational complexity that accumulated around it.
That is why the Airtable story feels less dramatic than the headline valuation decline suggests.
Venture capital did exactly what it is supposed to do here. It funded an ambitious company that created a category, built a product people love and reached nearly half a billion dollars in recurring revenue. Early investors made exceptional returns. Customers got a product that became core infrastructure inside hundreds of thousands of organizations.
The mistake was assuming that because Airtable was a great company, almost any price for it would eventually make sense.
Bending Spoons is now betting that underneath the expectations of 2021 sits a very good business, just not the $11.7 billion one investors thought they were buying.
