Bending Spoons, the Milan-based software acquisition firm known for buying and aggressively optimizing consumer and productivity apps, has agreed to acquire Airtable for $1.28 billion — a deal that underscores just how dramatically the SaaS valuation bubble has deflated since its 2021 zenith.

From $11B to $1.28B

At its peak in 2021, Airtable commanded a valuation north of $11 billion, fueled by pandemic-era demand for flexible, no-code collaboration tools and a broader investor frenzy around software multiples. The company raised over $1 billion in total venture funding from backers including Coatue, D1 Capital Partners, and Caffeinated Capital.

The decline was sharp. Earlier this year, Airtable's shares were reportedly changing hands on secondary markets at roughly $4 billion — already a 60%-plus haircut from peak. The Bending Spoons deal values the company at less than 12 cents on the dollar compared to that 2021 high.

Who Is Bending Spoons?

Bending Spoons has built a distinctive playbook in the software world: acquire established but underperforming products, cut costs aggressively, and extract profitability through disciplined operations. Its portfolio includes Evernote, Splice, WeTransfer, and Meetup — each acquired at distressed or discounted valuations relative to prior highs.

The firm is not a traditional strategic acquirer looking for synergies. It's closer to a private equity operator with a software-specific thesis: take a product with durable user demand, strip out inefficiency, and run it lean.

What This Means for Airtable

Airtable pioneered the "relational database meets spreadsheet" category and built a genuinely loyal user base among operations teams, product managers, and agencies. Its SaaS website and brand long projected the confidence of a category leader — but revenue growth apparently couldn't justify the premium valuation investors assigned in a zero-interest-rate environment.

Under Bending Spoons, users should expect the product to continue operating — the firm generally keeps products alive — but headcount reductions and a tighter feature roadmap are consistent with its historical pattern post-acquisition.

Broader SaaS Valuation Correction

Airtable's sale is one of the clearest data points yet in the ongoing repricing of software businesses:

  • Zendesk was taken private in 2022 at a significant discount to its public market highs
  • Qualtrics was acquired by Silver Lake in 2023 after its valuation collapsed post-IPO
  • Figma's blocked Adobe deal left it in limbo before pursuing an independent path

The pattern is consistent: companies that raised at 40–100x revenue multiples during 2020–2021 are now being valued at 5–10x, if that, when actual monetization is scrutinized.

Implications for Founders and Investors

For startup founders, the Airtable deal is a sobering reminder that raising at a high valuation creates an obligation — not just optionality. A high watermark can become a ceiling that makes acqui-hires, strategic sales, and even IPOs structurally difficult.

For investors still holding paper gains from 2021-era rounds, secondary market prices are increasingly the honest signal — not the last primary round headline number.

And for the no-code/low-code category broadly, consolidation appears to be accelerating. Tools that couldn't convert prosumer adoption into enterprise-grade, defensible revenue are now ripe for acquisition by operators who believe in the underlying product but not the original cap table.