Bending Spoons buys Airtable for $1.285B, a fraction of its 2021 peak

Airtable isn't a distressed business. Bending Spoons puts its annual recurring revenue at about $480 million as of June, growing more than 20% a year across more than 500,000 organisations. At its 2021 peak Airtable was valued at over $11 billion, and TechCrunch reported its shares had traded at around $4 billion on secondary markets earlier this year.

Why the price matters

Divide the enterprise value by the ARR and you get roughly 2.7 times recurring revenue (a FER calculation from Bending Spoons' figures). For a well-known, still-growing SaaS product, that's the price the market now puts on software an AI agent might be able to rebuild: not zero, but nowhere near 2021.

If you sell SaaS, it's a useful mirror. Buyers are paying for growth and for being hard to replace, not for being well known.

Why it matters if you use Airtable

Plenty of agencies and small teams run real operations on Airtable: client trackers, content calendars, light CRMs held together with automations. Bending Spoons says it's investing in Airtable "for the long run". Its earlier purchases, including Evernote and WeTransfer, were followed by price changes and restructuring. That doesn't mean the same will happen here. It does mean it's worth knowing your way out before you need it.

What to do this week

Give it an hour, not a project:

1. List the bases your business would struggle without for a week. Usually there are two or three.
2. Export each one to CSV and open the files. Check that linked records, attachments and long text fields come out in a form you could actually use.
3. Write down every automation and integration that touches those bases. That list is your real switching cost, and it's usually longer than you'd guess.
4. Check your plan, your seat count and your renewal date, so a price change doesn't arrive as a surprise.
5. If clients rely on Airtable views you've built for them, tell them you're keeping an eye on it. It's a reassuring note to send, and it costs you nothing.

If all of that looks fine, carry on. Airtable is still a good product. You just want any future decision to be yours, made on your timetable.