Bending Spoons buys Airtable for $1.3B
Bending Spoons is buying Airtable, a spreadsheet-like tool that about 500,000 companies use to organise their work. The business costs $1.285B. Airtable’s shareholders receive about $2.25B, because the buyer also gets the roughly $965M sitting in Airtable’s bank account. Airtable was valued at $11B in 2021.
Why the deal has two prices
Airtable has roughly $965M of cash in the bank. Part of that is money it raised and did not spend — it raised $1.35B in total — and part of it the business generated itself, having been cash-flow positive since late 2024.
$1.285B is the price of the business: the product, the 500,000 customers, the $480M of sales. $2.25B is the price of the company, because a buyer gets the bank account along with the business.
The cash is not paid out separately. It is already counted in the $2.25B, and $2.25B is the figure the shareholders divide between them.
Airtable’s 2.7× exit multiple against other 2026 software exits
$1.285B is the enterprise value — the price of the business once its cash is deducted. Against roughly $480M of annual recurring revenue that is 2.7 times sales. The median venture-backed software exit in 2026 cleared 5.2 times.
Source: Dealroom.co
Airtable’s sales roughly tripled between 2021 and 2026. Its valuation fell by 80% over the same period.
Airtable’s valuation at each funding round and at the exit
Post-money valuation at each round, the January 2026 secondary mark, then the exit. Airtable was founded in 2012; revenue grew from about $156M to about $480M while the multiple fell from 71× to 2.7×. Hover a point for the round details.
Source: Dealroom.co
Airtable was founded in 2012 by Howie Liu, Andrew Ofstad and Emmett Nicholas. It was Liu’s second company.
Who founded Airtable
The three founders and what they did previously. Photos and career records from Dealroom people profiles.
PreviouslyCo-founded Etacts, a contact manager acquired by Salesforce in December 2010, then worked at Salesforce as a product manager before starting Airtable.
PreviouslyProduct manager at Google — first on Android, then on Google Maps, where he led the product’s redesign. Studied engineering and economics at Duke.
PreviouslyEarly engineer at Stack Overflow, on the team that built Stack Exchange 2.0. Before that, a software engineer at Microsoft.
Source: Dealroom.co
At this price, who gets what is set by the terms each investor negotiated, not by how much of the company they own.
Later investors get their money back first
The rounds raised between 2018 and 2021 put in $1.29B. Their contracts let them take that money back before anything is divided among everyone else.
Dealroom estimates.
The business sold for $1.285B and the 2018 to 2021 rounds are owed $1.29B, so the $960M that reaches everyone else is, in effect, Airtable’s cash balance. Split by round, it is the 2015 investors who did best.
Money in and estimated money out, by investor
Each bubble is an investor’s estimated ticket, placed at its round; the green bubble is Dealroom’s estimate of their gross proceeds at the $2.25B equity value. Equal bubbles mean the 1× preference: those tickets get exactly their money back.
Dealroom estimates.
Who did well
Airtable’s 2015 backers bought their shares when the company was worth very little, so even this price multiplies their money many times over. The seed investors — Freestyle, BoxGroup and the angels alongside them — put in $3M and get about $135M back, 45 times what they paid. CRV led the $7.6M Series A later that year and gets about $180M, 24 times.
Founders and employees hold about a third of the company. They are paid last, after every investor has taken their share, and $405M is left for them.
The investors who came in later paid much higher prices for the same company. What they bought was the right to take their money back before anyone else, and that is all they get: the four rounds from 2018 to 2021 put in $1.29B and take out $1.29B, four to eight years later.
Bending Spoons pays multiples in this range routinely.
Revenue multiples Bending Spoons has paid on its disclosed acquisitions
Revenue multiples on its disclosed deals. At $2.25B of equity value Airtable is its largest acquisition, and the only target still growing at 20%.
Source: Dealroom.co
Set that against what the market pays for Bending Spoons’ own revenue.
Airtable’s exit multiple against Bending Spoons’ own market multiple
Since listing on Nasdaq on 1 July, Bending Spoons’ own revenue has been valued at 13.9×. Airtable’s revenue costs it 2.7×, so the same revenue is worth about five times more once it sits inside the listed company, before any costs are cut.
Source: Dealroom.co · Nasdaq
What this means
Airtable is a real business with $480M of sales, and it sold for 2.7 times those sales. The people who backed it in 2015 still did well, and the staff share $405M. The investors who paid the high 2021 prices got their money back and nothing more. Bending Spoons buys sales at 2.7 times while the stock market values its own sales at nearly 14 times, which is where the deal makes money for the buyer.