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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

#61

Post by jgalt212 »

reticulates wrote: post #14
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?

ARR has always been a bullshit number but it is an especially bullshit number nowadays because AI has destroyed software margins.

I guess in the sense that if your goal is to sell, you'd optimize on revenues. That being said, when I look at an income statement I am usually more suspect of costs than revenues.

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

#62

Post by rchaud »

dbbk wrote: post #49
cagataygurturk wrote: post #19

Bending Spoons is where products go to die.

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.

In other words, the private equity sales pitch. You left out the bit about jacking up the price and milking customers for every penny until their contracts expire.

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

#63

Post by jasode »

ldayley wrote: post #60
jasode wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>This goes for almost all software. 'entshittification' in software It's really every category of commercial activity. Restaurants food quality, cable tv channels, movie sequels, home appliances, airline travel, theme parks, etc. For years, I had a particular local HVAC company do my twice-a-year maintenance on my air conditioner and furnace. I liked the owner and he had a crew of older experienced guys that knew wha…

Private equity firms are buying profitable local businesses all over the US, including HVAC, plumbing, auto techs, storage, etc. So it’s possible that this case of enshittification actually WAS caused private equity in your example.

In my case, the new HVAC owner is just another local resident that had an existing local area HVAC shop. Nothing to do with any private equity rollup.

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

#64

Post by minraws »

shubhamjain wrote: post #23
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?

If these numbers are remotely true, there's either a crucial number missing or investors are utter idiots who forced this sale. Won't be surprised if it's the latter. Assuming M&A deals take at least a few months to close, this acquisition was probably set in motion around April, when SaaS sentiment was near rock bottom and cash-flow machines like Cloudflare, Adobe, and Snowflake were getting crushed simply because A…

I think the revenues must have taken a hit or growth was getting harder, otherwise this doesn't make sense also IV is 2.25B so assuming cash went to investors + some employee equity. I don't think other than early investors and founders others made much of anything.

But if the revenues were hit this might be a home run, given AI could replace all of airtable in about a weekend e2e, but then again a competent team of 2-3 devs could have done it over a few weeks, it wasn't ever really about the product quality.

My condolences to all the Airtable users, who are about to get fleeced now, they should consider moving to anything else, even vibe coded slop might be ok.

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

#67

Post by serial_dev »

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.

Was anything else needed to be added to the product?

I was fine with meetup.com in its original form: it had the community of people wanting to go to events, it let you share your events to these people. People showed up to events.

And the price you pay is for you to access their users. If you think it's just an RSVP page, vibe code one in 5 minutes and try and see how many people will show up to your events.

It's a modern product development failure to think that you must be adding new features all the time. "Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away."

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

#68

Post by 0gs »

dmblit wrote: post #40

People are reacting like Bending Spoons is going to make Airtable worse, whereas in fact being acquired by bending spoons is already the indicated of things being worse than ever. Which may be a little premature for Airtable but definitely not unexpected. As to what will bending spoons do with it - does anyone know (or care) what did they do with Evernote, or AOL? Airtable felt stuck for a long before that, now is ju…

i gotta say, there were some bumps post-acquistion, but evernote is still going strong. not too AI-sloppy, a few new features here and there, reliability still aok. they were worse pre-acquisition imx.

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

#69

Post by cm277 »

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.
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