The Numbers
Airtable sold to Bending Spoons for $1.285B enterprise value, roughly $2.25B equity value with net cash. All cash. Expected close by year end, pending regulatory approval.
What that buys: $480M ARR as of June 2026, growing 20% year over year. About 90% gross margins. Cash flow positive since late 2024, throwing off $100M+ annually. More than 500,000 organisations, 80% of the Fortune 100.
That is 2.7x ARR for one of the best-known B2B software companies of the last decade.
How We Got Here
Founded in 2012, Airtable spent a decade building the category: relational database with a spreadsheet interface, sold bottoms-up into enterprise. In December 2021 it raised $735M at $11.7B post-money, about 75x ARR at the time.
Then the cycle turned. Two layoff rounds, 491 people total. Growth decelerated. The company cut to cash flow positive by late 2024, kept roughly half its $1.4B raised on the balance sheet, and kept shipping.
They did the AI pivot properly: acquired DeepSky, hired David Azose from OpenAI as CTO, launched Superagent and Hyperagent, bundled AI into every plan. Founder-CEO Howie Liu went back to writing code.
The result was 20% growth. Not re-acceleration. Stabilisation.
Why This Matters
Airtable had no forcing function. No debt, no burn, roughly $700M in the bank. It could have stayed private indefinitely.
What it did not have was a path back to $11.7B. IPO at 20% growth means going public well under the last private round. The secondary market had been repricing it for three years, and the clearing price landed 89% below the 2021 valuation.
For SaaS valuations in 2026: if you are growing 20% on $480M ARR with 90% margins and Fortune 100 penetration, you get 2.7x. That is the market.
Private marks are not prices. This is the price.
One Detail Worth Noting
Per the SEC filing, Airtable carved out Hyperagent, its autonomous AI worker platform, before the sale. It went into a separate entity called Hyperagent Inc. Bending Spoons cited the same $480M ARR after the carve-out, so Hyperagent was contributing roughly nothing to revenue.
What it tells you is where Liu is going next, and that the agent bet was structured to survive the sale.
Bending Spoons is the Milan-based serial acquirer that IPO'd on Nasdaq in July 2026 at $18.4B. Airtable is its first deal since listing.