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Bending Spoons makes first post-IPO acquisition with $1.3B Airtable deal

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Re: Bending Spoons makes first post-IPO acquisition with $1.3B Airtable deal

#111

Post by dbbk »

CodesInChaos wrote: post #103
dbbk wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe going against the grain but I think their product philosophy is actually really interesting. They basically just buy the database. Then throw out the crappily built product, with years of tech debt and cruft, and rebuild it leanly, with a small team, low overheads, and ruthlessly optimise for efficiency, and amortise shared in-house resources across the product portfolio. There's a strong logic to that.

> Then throw out the crappily built product, with years of tech debt and cruft, and rebuild it leanly Which products have they rebuilt? I mostly hear about them selling the existing product at a higher price while reducing the size of the development team.

This is well documented. Evernote being the main example. They also rebuilt Cabinet completely from scratch.

Re: Bending Spoons makes first post-IPO acquisition with $1.3B Airtable deal

#112

Post by petilon »

prennert wrote: post #99
xavdid wrote: post #98

Bummer. Airtable's a killer product and I've been using and evangelizing it for nearly 10 years at this point. Built whole side projects around it (and its API), plus organized a ton of personal information. I've made some custom integrations too which have just kept working without maintenance for years. I've got fairly regular backups of all my data, but still. Hurts my heart a little. Best case scenario it keeps w…

Why not simply rebuild what you need with Claude? Airtable seems to me as a prototyping product. Once you know what you want, formulate it as product objectives and ask Claude how it could be implemented from scratch. Dont even give it any ideas about Django. Just ask it what technologies are sensible for what you need, read and verify its answers, lock in a stack, plan your features and implement them. You will be s…

> Why not simply rebuild what you need with Claude?

Claude isn't some magic genie that can give you whatever you ask for. If you need a spreadsheet, it is much easier at this point to start Excel than to ask Claude to write you an Excel.

Re: Bending Spoons makes first post-IPO acquisition with $1.3B Airtable deal

#113

Post by petilon »

browningstreet wrote: post #76

I have a lot of personal stuff in Airtable. It's really nice software but the company has struggled. Omni, their AI agent was terrible, and yet the founders have doubled down on agents with Hyperagents (nee Superagents). I'm sure Notion DBs ate their lunch, but Coda had the best document database integration I've seen, but they got bought by Superhuman. This entire market space is going to be messy for a while.

> Omni, their AI agent was terrible

What was terrible about it?

Re: Bending Spoons makes first post-IPO acquisition with $1.3B Airtable deal

#114

Post by RigelKentaurus »

minraws wrote: post #8

I had some thoughts but for context. Basically, widely reported Airtable's 2026 reported ARR was close to $500M. they sold at a ~3x multiple assuming it went flat/down~~. They had raised $1.4B (total latest around 770M) in funding I am not sure for what?? and had ~1B in cash (according to some online sources)?? Now I have no idea what this is even about, maybe all investors wanted out?

My (semi-educated) guess: it's about the quality, not quantity, of that revenue. If I opened their books, I expect to see lots of SMB customers with low deal sizes and non-trivial churn, non-sticky product usage, not many large enterprises signing up, and low NRR. Add a high customer acquisition cost in an undifferentiated space to complete the picture.

I didn't understand why a CRUD app (yes, with lots of integrations and bells and whistles) would need to raise more $1B+. I think most of that went into GTM, not into product development.

(Addition: Airtable had $900M in the bank at the time of acquisition so they spent "only" $400M, but still, my guess is that a lot of that went into GTM.)

Re: Bending Spoons makes first post-IPO acquisition with $1.3B Airtable deal

#115

Post by sunnybeetroot »

senko wrote: post #43
DetroitThrow wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yes, _every_ event I go uses Luma or something else nowadays.

I've been researching the alternatives as I've been really.annoyed by the Meetup.com enshittification. Any other platforms besides Luma you hear about? I know some lean on WhatsApp, some tried to use FB or even LinkedIn events but these are really made for different use cases.

Apple invites?

Re: Bending Spoons makes first post-IPO acquisition with $1.3B Airtable deal

#116

Post by peter_d_sherman »

"Bending Spoons"... never heard about them until now... let' do some research!:

Wikipedia:

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bending_Spoons)

>"Based in Milan, the company acquires products with existing product‑market fit[4][5] (such as AOL, Eventbrite, Evernote, komoot, Meetup, Tractive, Vimeo, and WeTransfer) and manages them for long-term ownership, often increasing revenue and lowering expenses (including by reducing headcount).[6][7] The company employs full-stack developers to rewrite acquired codebases using artificial intelligence, proprietary platform tools, and open-source software (often Python, FastAPI, and TypeScript).[8][9]"

Ah!

So they're kind of the equivalent of a

special kind of Private Equity firm

that specifically purchases/manages/improves: Commerical websites, Apps, SaaS'es and other Digital/Software products that already have many users/customers (aka "Product-Market Fit" in business parlance...)

Although, arguably, Microsoft, while never called a "Private Equity" firm, sort of did all of that first, with other tech companies, in earlier decades!

Well, wait a second now...

If memory serves me, then actually Computer Associates did all of that (for software mostly for the Mainframe / Minicomputer markets and related!) even earlier than Microsoft, probably about a decade or so earlier than Microsoft!

Anyway, interesting article!

Re: Bending Spoons makes first post-IPO acquisition with $1.3B Airtable deal

#117

Post by __s »

darkwater wrote: post #31
katspaugh wrote: post #17

After they acquired Meetup.com, subscription prices skyrocketed while nothing useful was added to the product. 29€ a month just to host a meetup page with RSVPs.

Did users leave for other products/solutions?

One group I followed switched to LinkedIn

Re: Bending Spoons makes first post-IPO acquisition with $1.3B Airtable deal

#118

Post by meetingthrower »

maffulli wrote: post #106
meetingthrower wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Second Grist it is very cool we use a lot of it. You can run python as a column/ cell and it doesn't have a lot of the limitations of Airtable. Usage tiers are ridiculously large. Free api. I am almost hoping they charge more so they stay in business.

Thanks for the mention (I work at Grist)! We want to stay in business, indeed. How much shall we charge? :)

Honestly the "charge by data" is probably missing some things. We have quite a few users on the free tier. I found out my ops guys were optimizing the data to keep on the free tier because it would jump from zero to [something still reasonable] but would be a multiple of seats. They would pay you SOMETHING but the big jump to MORE seemed too much for them lol.

They are on Grist by my recommendation after searching for tools. I just checked in on it after 6 months and they have built their entire manufacturing process management on it... Good stuff.

Re: Bending Spoons makes first post-IPO acquisition with $1.3B Airtable deal

#120

Post by throw03172019 »

cm277 wrote: post #69
minraws wrote: post #8

I had some thoughts but for context. Basically, widely reported Airtable's 2026 reported ARR was close to $500M. they sold at a ~3x multiple assuming it went flat/down~~. They had raised $1.4B (total latest around 770M) in funding I am not sure for what?? and had ~1B in cash (according to some online sources)?? Now I have no idea what this is even about, maybe all investors wanted out?

I strongly suspect a big chunk of their revenue was enterprise where it was probably used as a CRUD app / Access replacement with proper controls. That's low hanging fruit for Claude and friends, so their renewals/ARR must have started dropping off and they sold while the selling was good.

You could say the same about Retool but their enterprise customers appreciate the SSO among other security forward features.
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