Bending Spoons, the former unicorn that posted a 95% revenue growth year-over-year, agreed Tuesday to buy Airtable in an all-cash deal that values the software company at $1.285 billion, with an equity value of about $2.25 billion once Airtable’s cash balance is factored in. The deal marks the Italian company’s first acquisition since it went public on the Nasdaq in June.
The price is a steep drop from Airtable’s peak. The database and spreadsheet company raised more than $1.4 billion in venture funding and was valued at over $11 billion during the 2021 tech boom, when investors were pricing software companies on growth alone. Earlier this year, its shares traded on secondary markets at around $4 billion. Tuesday’s deal values it at less than a quarter of that secondary-market price, and about a fifth of its 2021 high.
“We’re looking forward to welcoming Airtable into Bending Spoons. Airtable is a pioneering brand reshaping how teams organize data and manage critical workflows,” said Bending Spoons CEO and co-founder Luca Ferrari in a company release. He also tied the price to Airtable’s growth: “The value being delivered is reflected in annual recurring revenue growing over 20% YoY to approximately $480 million as of June 2026, and joining forces with Bending Spoons will accelerate innovation even further.”
Airtable, founded in 2013, serves more than 500,000 organizations, including 80% of the Fortune 100. Its annual recurring revenue grew more than 20% year-over-year to about $480 million as of June, according to the companies. Bending Spoons said the deal is expected to close by the end of the year, pending regulatory approval.
A software valuation bust
Part of the answer for how the price fell so far lies in what happened to software valuations broadly since 2021. The boom rewarded fast-growing subscription companies with valuations that assumed growth would keep compounding. Many of those companies, Airtable included, have since had to prove that growth at a lower multiple, and secondary markets adjusted well before any acquirer showed up. Bending Spoons co-founder Matteo Danieli told TechCrunch the company views the current environment for software valuations as favorable for a buyer, saying Bending Spoons had largely avoided the reset itself while others deployed capital into it.
That timing is central to Bending Spoons’ strategy. The company has built a portfolio of more than 50 acquisitions by targeting apps it considers well known but underpriced relative to their user base, then cutting costs and reworking pricing and product design. Airtable fits a pattern that already includes AOL, Eventbrite, Evernote, Vimeo and WeTransfer, though it differs in one respect: unlike some past targets, Airtable’s revenue was still growing at the time of the sale rather than stalling.
Going public
The deal is also the first test of that strategy since Bending Spoons became a public company. Its F-1 filing in June gave the public its first detailed look at the finances behind its acquisition model: revenue grew 95% year over year to $1.31 billion in 2025, more than tripling since 2023, while operating profit more than doubled to $278 million. That momentum continued into 2026, with first-quarter revenue more than doubling to $601.3 million and the company swinging to a $27.5 million net profit from a $112.2 million net loss a year earlier. Bending Spoons priced its Nasdaq listing at $29 a share in July, above its marketed range, valuing the company at roughly $18.4 billion; shares closed at $36.22 on Monday.
The Airtable deal arrives in the middle of what’s shaping up to be a hot IPO summer, with SpaceX trading around $1.4 trillion and Anthropic raising at a $965 billion post-money valuation, a run that has minted a new class of ultra-wealthy “IPO Bros”. OpenAI is also expected to go public, and the boom has broadened well past AI names: South Korean chipmaker SK Hynix priced its U.S. depositary receipts at $149 each, raising about $26.5 billion in one of the largest U.S. share sales ever by a foreign issuer. Against that backdrop, Bending Spoons is a smaller but closely watched debut, and Tuesday’s deal gives investors an early look at how it plans to spend the capital it raised.
The post In its first deal since going public, Italian unicorn Bending Spoons buys Airtable at a $9 billion discount appeared first on Fortune.
