Inside the Airtable-Bending Spoons Sale

What an ending. Airtable, valued at $11 billion in 2021 after a trio of funding rounds in under two years, is being acquired by Italian conglomerate Bending Spoons for just $1.285 billion in cash, the companies said on Tuesday. The price tag for the once-hot productivity app seems like a blow to shareholders, particularly those like hedge fund XN, Thrive Capital and Greenoaks Capital that led its last rounds. And the price, amounting to less than three times annualized revenue, should lower expectations for future sales of enterprise software startups (Airtable was No. 2 on our recent list of such targets.)

But there’s more to this deal than meets the eye. Alongside the deal price, Airtable also has around $900 million in cash on its balance sheet that can be distributed to its preferred stockholders. What’s left goes to its common shareholders, according to people with knowledge of the deal. That’s in part due to Airtable CEO Howie Liu’s energetic fundraising, which brought in $1.3 billion over the company’s 14-year history.