Bending Spoons, an Italian software company, has agreed to buy Airtable for $1.285 billion in cash. The deal was announced through a Business Wire press release on July 30, 2026, and reported by Reuters on August 4, 2026. It is the company's first acquisition since going public in July 2026 at an $18 billion valuation. Business Wire

Bending Spoons was founded by Luca Ferrari. The company has previously bought several well-known software products, including Evernote, WeTransfer, Eventbrite, and Vimeo. Airtable is a different kind of purchase for the company. While those earlier products serve everyday consumers and creators, Airtable is used by businesses to build custom applications without needing to write much code. TechCrunch

The purchase price of $1.285 billion is a fraction of what Airtable was once worth. At its peak in 2021, the company was valued at over $11 billion after raising more than $1.4 billion from investors. Earlier in 2026, Airtable shares were changing hands on secondary markets at a valuation of around $4 billion. Bending Spoons said that including Airtable's cash on hand, the company is worth about $2.25 billion. The final price falls roughly between that figure and the secondary market valuation. TechCrunch

Airtable was founded in 2013 by Howie Liu, who is still the CEO. Liu said the company serves over 500,000 organizations, including 80% of the Fortune 100 — the largest companies in the United States. Airtable's annual recurring revenue, meaning the money it can count on from subscriptions each year, grew over 20% from the previous year to about $480 million as of June 2026. That means Bending Spoons is paying roughly 2.7 times Airtable's yearly subscription revenue, a ratio that gets even lower once you account for the cash sitting on Airtable's balance sheet. TechCrunch

In January 2026, Airtable launched a new product called Superagent. It is a platform for deploying AI agents — programs that can carry out tasks on their own with limited human supervision. The product is part of Airtable's effort to move beyond its core tool, which combines features of spreadsheets and databases, and into the growing market for AI-powered automation. TechCrunch

The drop from an $11 billion valuation to $1.285 billion is dramatic — an roughly 88% decline. It fits a broader pattern. Many software companies that raised money in 2021 did so at very high prices because investors were betting on rapid growth. Those prices have since come down across the industry. What makes Airtable's case stand out is that the company was still growing revenue at over 20% per year with nearly half a billion dollars in annual subscription income. A growing, revenue-generating business is being bought for a small fraction of what investors once believed it was worth on paper.

Bending Spoons has a consistent approach to acquisitions. The company buys software products that already have large numbers of users, folds them into its own operations, and focuses on making them profitable rather than just growing fast. Evernote, WeTransfer, Eventbrite, and Vimeo all fit that mold. Airtable does too, though it costs far more than any of those earlier deals and serves a different kind of customer — large businesses rather than individual users.

The deal also comes just weeks after Bending Spoons went public at an $18 billion valuation. Spending $1.285 billion in cash so soon after an IPO is an aggressive step for a newly public company. It suggests Bending Spoons sees this period as a chance to expand by buying other companies rather than settling into a quieter phase.

For Airtable's customers, the main concern is whether the product will keep running smoothly under new ownership. Bending Spoons has generally kept the products it acquires operating, though the company is known for restructuring the teams behind them. Airtable's large corporate customers and its new Superagent AI platform add a layer of complexity that Bending Spoons has not dealt with before. Running a business database and AI automation platform is different from running a file-sharing service or a note-taking app.

Because the deal is all cash, Bending Spoons is not tying the purchase price to Airtable's future performance. There are no shared-risk arrangements. Whether the $1.285 billion was well spent will depend on whether Bending Spoons can grow Airtable's revenue beyond its current $480 million, hold on to its large corporate customers through the transition, and find a market for Superagent in an increasingly crowded field of AI products.