Airtable didn't get acquired - it got divorced

Thoughts on the acquisition, the valuation reset, and what got left behind

Airtable was acquired this week by new age PE firm Bending Spoons for ~$1.2B. After the initial shock wore off, I came away with a slightly different reaction than the takeaway most people seem to have landed on.

The number everyone’s quoting: $11.7B in 2021, $1.28B enterprise value now. That’s the kind of drop that gets you a eulogy instead of a press release.

Airtable raised roughly $1.4B and sold at a $2.25B equity value. That clears the preference stack but not by much. The leftover cash (call it ~$850M) gets split among common and the early holders. So if you joined in 2015 and stuck around for a decade, congratulations, you got about a 10x haircut from the peak.

What gets me is that the business isn’t totally broken: ~$480M ARR as of June, still growing 20%+, half a million organizations, 80% of the Fortune 100 in there somewhere and it went for 2.7x ARR. Comparable cloud companies growing at that same rate typically trade closer to 7-8x. Nobody was in distress here yet the market just decided to price a perfectly good software company like a utility.

However, the acquisition isn’t the interesting part to me. The interesting part is what Bending Spoons didn’t buy. HyperAgent - Airtable’s agent orchestration product, and the piece that was reportedly growing substantially - got carved out before the deal. Bending Spoons bought the old business and the new one walked out the door.

That’s the move worth watching and I wouldn’t be surprised to see it again. Bending Spoons runs one trade, and they run it well: buy a recognizable product below its last private mark, cut the org down, simplify the roadmap, run it for cash. Evernote, WeTransfer, Vimeo, Eventbrite. So if you’re Airtable’s board, why leave your AI product stapled to an asset being priced by a buyer who doesn’t pay for upside?

Inside the incumbent, HyperAgent gets valued as a feature bolted onto a shrinking multiple. Outside it, it gets valued as a startup. Nothing about the product changes but the value changes considerably.

That gap is arbitrage, and every board sitting on a 2021 mark they can no longer defend is doing this math right now. The old fix for a broken valuation was a down round but the new one looks more like a separation - sell the body, keep the brain, refinance the brain at a multiple the body could never carry.

The part I’m less sure about - what made an AI product inside Airtable interesting was mostly Airtable. The 500k customers, the workflow data, and the seats you could already upsell into. Distribution was a huge moat and without it, you’ve got a cleaner cap table but a much harder go-to-market.

So in my opinion, yes, more of these are coming. The question for 2027 is whether any of the spun-off halves actually grow once they’re standing on their own.