Bending Spoons to Buy Airtable For $1.28 Billion (techcrunch.com) 13
Bending Spoons has made its first acquisition since going public last month at an $18 billion valuation, agreeing to buy spreadsheet and database startup Airtable for $1.28 billion in cash. Airtable joins a growing portfolio of notable brands owned by the Italian app developer, including Evernote, WeTransfer, EventBrite, and Vimeo. TechCrunch reports: Founded in 2013, Airtable has so far raised more than $1.4 billion over multiple funding rounds. At its peak, during the boom days of 2021, it was valued at over $11 billion, but earlier this year, its shares were said to be trading on the secondary markets at a valuation of $4 billion. With its current net cash-and-cash-equivalents balance, Airtable is now valued at about $2.25 billion, Bending Spoons said.
"Airtable is a pioneering brand reshaping how teams organize data and manage critical workflows. 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," Bending Spoons' founder Luca Ferrari said in a statement.
"Airtable is a pioneering brand reshaping how teams organize data and manage critical workflows. 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," Bending Spoons' founder Luca Ferrari said in a statement.
Who? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Airtable Review (2026): The Best Spreadsheet-Database Hybrid for Teams? [makerdeck.co]
What Is Airtable?
Airtable is a cloud-based platform that combines the simplicity of a spreadsheet with the power of a relational database. Founded in 2012 by Howie Liu, Andrew Ofstad, and Emmett Nicholas, Airtable has raised over $1.4 billion in funding and is valued at $11 billion. Over 450,000 organizations use Airtable, including companies like Netflix, Shopify, and the Red Cross.
The core concept: each Airtable “base” is a relational database with multiple linked tables, but the interface looks and feels like a spreadsheet. You get familiar row-and-column editing, plus database features like linked records, rollups, lookups, and field types (attachments, checkboxes, single/multi-select, dates, currency). Multiple views — grid, kanban, calendar, gallery, gantt, form — let different team members see the same data in the format most useful to them.
Airtable’s target audience is operations teams, marketing teams, product managers, and anyone who has outgrown spreadsheets but doesn’t need (or want to build) a full database application.
Re: (Score:1)
Apparently, the kid who bent spoons in The Matrix is buying a hockey game for one-and-a-quarter million... wish I owned that table hockey game! (/end sarcasm)
Really, though... how is this news on here? There's gotta be a dozen sales like this twice a day (probably small, but you never know).
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
It includes Claude AI (Score:2)
So, "all your data belong to us"?
Bending Spoons sucks (Score:5, Interesting)
My dad lost access to his email account (AOL) for over two months. Every time we called all we were told was everything looked good with his account, but if we pay them, Bending Spoons, they can get us help.
Submitting a support issue through their web site got AI responses. The last email I have from them was from "Greg" telling me he'd reviewed everything and repeated the exact same thing we were told when we called. The problem was, "Greg" had previously asked me for a screenshot of what my dad was seeing, which was a blank, white screen when he was challenged to prove he was who said he was, something he never had to do in the decade he was with AOL.*
Had "Greg" truly reviewed the account, "he" would have seen his comment to approve the request was impossible because there was nothing to approve.
Bending Spoons is just an aggregator of crap companies. Anyone who put money into their stock is getting scammed.
* My dad's email was moved from his ISP to AOL which is why he has an AOL account. I recently got him another account somewhere else where all his important stuff, such as medical and financial information, won't be held hostage by an incompetent company.
Airtable users should bail now (Score:2)
Nothing says “innovation” like buying a useful, growing product at a distressed valuation, firing the people who built it, hiking subscription prices, crippling the free tier, and calling the resulting rent-extraction machine now “sustainable.”
Bending Spoons claims they're rescuing businesses, but what they really do is fuck anyone who bought into a platform they've purchased.
It’s applying the private-equity model to existing infrastructure: user lock-in, cut labor, reduce serv
How will that help? (Score:2)
was my first reaction to the headline
Enshitification as a company motto. (Score:3)
Bending Spoons sees decent companies that provide something end-users actually like, buys the company, then turns that thing users like into something with the vague sheen of what they used to like, but more monetized, somewhat crippled, with favorite features clusterfucked with happy-happy messaging about improvements that aren't. The fact that companies like this don't just exists, but thrive in our world, is a sign we went horribly wrong somewhere along the line. We reward these parasitic profit generators with ever escalating value and profit, while allowing the better parts of the business world to be sucked up into them like black holes, slowly spaghettifying them, stretching the positive that made them interested in whatever they consumed to slowly turn into nothing but a thin string of empty promise, that if you squint almost looks like the memory of that good thing they initially purchased.
It's super stupid, but it seems to be the way of everything now.
Business idea (Score:2)
Buggs Bunny is opening a Coyote Grill.
As a side note, did we not learn long ago: there is no spoon?