Airtable Acquired by Bending Spoons: What You Need to Know
On August 4, 2026, Bending Spoons announced a definitive agreement to acquire Airtable. The all-cash deal values Airtable at an enterprise value of $1.285 billion, which works out to roughly $2.25 billion in equity value once Airtable’s cash balance is counted.
It is the Italian company’s first acquisition since listing on Nasdaq on July 1, 2026. Both boards approved it unanimously, and it is expected to close later this year subject to regulatory approval.
Airtable is not a struggling company. Its annual recurring revenue was around $480 million as of June 2026, growing over 20% year over year.
What Bending Spoons has done with its other acquisitions
This is the part worth paying attention to, because Bending Spoons runs a consistent playbook and it is well documented.
The company buys mature software with loyal users, cuts costs hard, and raises prices. It has done this with Evernote (2022), FiLMiC (2022), Meetup (2024), Hopin and StreamYard (2024), WeTransfer (2024), and AOL.
Evernote is the case study. After the 2022 acquisition, Bending Spoons let go most of the US team and moved operations to Europe. Then pricing moved. Customers who paid $37 a year for the Pro plan before 2023 were being charged $250 a year by 2026, according to The Pragmatic Engineer, which describes the strategy as maximizing revenue rather than the number of customers. Evernote’s free tier shrank in the same period.
StreamYard followed the pattern. After the Hopin deal, around 80 staff working on StreamYard and another 70 on other Hopin products were let go, with severance of roughly three to four months’ salary. At WeTransfer, reporting after the 2024 acquisition pointed to plans to cut about 75% of staff.
Both CEOs are saying the right things about the future. Bending Spoons CEO Luca Ferrari said the company is “committed to investing in Airtable for the long run, and doubling down on its core strength,” and Airtable co-founder and CEO Howie Liu said the deal “gives us the resources and the long-term commitment Airtable needs to pursue that vision.” Those statements are sincere as far as they go. They are also what gets said at every announcement, including the previous ones.
What this means if you run bases today
Nothing changes immediately. The deal has not closed, and regulatory approval takes months. Your bases, automations, and integrations keep working exactly as they do now.
The realistic timeline for change is after close, and based on the pattern above, the two things most likely to move are price and the free tier. Airtable’s free plan and its per-seat costs are the obvious levers for a buyer that has pulled both before.
Four things worth doing before the deal closes
1. Export your data now, and know how long it takes. Not because anything is wrong, but because you should never learn your export path for the first time under pressure. Airtable supports CSV export per table. If your bases lean on linked records, attachments, or interfaces, find out now what actually survives a round trip.
2. Look at your renewal date. If you are on monthly billing and you plan to keep using Airtable, an annual commitment locked in before close is the cheapest insurance available against a repricing. That is the concrete lesson from Evernote’s $37 to $250 move.
3. Write down what you actually use. Most heavy Airtable bases use a fraction of the product. If you are paying per seat for people who only read a view, that is the first cost to look at regardless of who owns the company.
4. Audit what depends on Airtable. Automations, scripts, and any tool syncing into a base are the parts that break quietly. Inventory them now while nothing is urgent.
Where the automation layer sits
One detail worth separating: for many teams, Airtable is two products at once. It is the database, and it is the automation engine wired around it.
Those can be decoupled. If Airtable is where your data lives but the value is in the workflows firing off it, the workflow layer does not have to be tied to the same vendor’s pricing. Carly connects to Airtable natively and runs AI agents on real event triggers, so the automation keeps working regardless of what happens to seat pricing. Free Zapier-style workflows; AI agents from $35/month.
That is not a reason to leave Airtable. It is a reason to know which half of your setup is actually locked in.
If you do want to look around
We keep a current list of Airtable alternatives, and a breakdown of how Airtable’s pricing works today, which is the baseline you will want to compare against if plans change after close.
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