Bending Spoons, the Italian app developer, agreed to buy Airtable for about $1.285 billion in cash, the companies said — its first acquisition since going public, and one of the steepest markdowns in recent software history.
At the peak of the venture boom in 2022, Airtable raised a round that valued it at $11.7 billion. The deal announced this week values the company at about 11 percent of that peak, a decline that tracks the arc of the low-code software category it helped create.
Airtable makes a product that sits between a spreadsheet and a database, letting non-programmers build custom databases and workflows without writing code. Founded in 2012 by a small team of engineers, it became a favorite of startups and operations teams, and its flexible grid became a fixture of the modern office. It was one of the stars of the low-code movement, a category that promised software anyone could build.
The slide from $11.7 billion to $1.285 billion tells the story of the category. Growth slowed as the venture boom ended, and Airtable cut staff as its costs outpaced its revenue. It struggled to convert a popular product into durable, growing sales, and it faced a new generation of competitors — including Notion and Coda — that attacked the same customers with different tools. Bloomberg, reporting the deal, framed it as a repricing of low-code databases by the AI narrative: software that organizes data is being valued against what AI can now do with data directly.
The rise of AI assistants has changed the calculus for productivity software. Notion has added AI features, and a growing list of AI-native apps can organize, summarize and query data without a human building a structure for it first. Investors have repriced the whole category, and Airtable’s sale price is the clearest expression of that repricing: a company that defined a category now sells for a fraction of its peak value.
The buyer is an unusual one. Bending Spoons, based in Milan, built a business out of buying struggling apps, overhauling them and cutting costs. It took Evernote, a once-celebrated note-taking app, and ran it as a lean operation, and it repeated the playbook with WeTransfer, Meetup and a portfolio of photo and video tools. The company listed on the Milan exchange, and the Airtable deal is its first acquisition since that listing.
Bending Spoons’ playbook is predictable: keep the product, cut the overhead, push AI features. The company has said AI is central to its strategy, and Airtable’s data-management product fits that direction. The acquisition gives Bending Spoons a foothold in business software, a new category for a company known for consumer apps, and a customer base of companies that pay real money for a tool they depend on.
For Airtable’s investors, the sale is a bruising outcome. The company raised more than $1 billion in venture funding over its life, and the deal price leaves little return for many of those backers. The willingness to sell at this level says the independent growth story had run its course, analysts said: Airtable could not grow fast enough to justify its peak valuation, and the alternative to selling was a long, slow decline as AI tools ate into its market.
The deal also reflects the state of software M&A. Valuations have reset, and acquirers with cash are picking up quality assets at a fraction of boom-era prices. AI has accelerated the repricing: buyers now ask what a software product is worth when AI can replicate its core function, and the answers are coming in lower than anyone expected two years ago.
For the employees, the sale brings the usual uncertainty. Bending Spoons is known for running acquired companies with far smaller teams, and its history suggests headcount changes are likely. The company has said it plans to invest in the product, but its track record with Evernote and other acquisitions points to a leaner operation.
The deal also says something about the market for business software. The low-code database category that Airtable defined has not disappeared — companies still need to organize data — but the value has shifted to the AI layer on top of it. Airtable’s product becomes more valuable as a foundation for AI tools, and less valuable as a standalone story.
The acquisition is the company’s largest since it went public, and it follows a pattern investors have come to recognize. Bending Spoons buys software with a loyal user base and a bloated cost structure, then rebuilds the product around a leaner team and a subscription model. Its takeover of Evernote in 2022 and Meetup in 2024 both followed that script, with headcount cuts announced within weeks of closing and prices for premium tiers raised soon after. The company has described the approach as product-led turnarounds, arguing that small teams shipping quickly beat large ones moving slowly.
For Airtable, the sale closes a chapter that began with venture-fueled hype. For Bending Spoons, it opens one: a Milan-based acquirer betting it can do for business software what it did for note-taking. The price says the market no longer believes in the old story. Whether the new owner can write a better one is the question.
