alt.hn

8/4/2026 at 9:27:47 AM

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

 https://live.euronext.com/en/financial-news/bending-spoons-makes-first-post-ipo-acquisition-13-billion-airtable-deal

by riffraff

8/4/2026 at 10:16:20 AM

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?

by minraws

8/4/2026 at 12:48:57 PM

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.

by cm277

8/4/2026 at 10:30:15 AM

Eyeing Wikipedia it seems like it sold for about raised capital. Probably very little product value but some b2b contracts to milk?

by rightbyte

8/4/2026 at 10:22:31 AM

Probably they are getting eaten by new AI integrations and the numbers don’t look good.

It’s strange, I thought they were in pole position to integrate into vibe coded apps with bolt and co. Maybe be a strategy issue?

by elias_t

8/4/2026 at 10:48:00 AM

It's used by non technical people so not sure AI is the competition.

Perhaps Notion and all the project planning apps like Linear, ClickUp, Asana?

by v5v3

8/4/2026 at 11:10:00 AM

> It's used by non technical people so not sure AI is the competition.

I mean yes but most of them are vibe coding apps now

> Perhaps Notion and all the project planning apps like Linear, ClickUp, Asana?

Most probably, but their market share must have free fall for such valuation

by elias_t

8/4/2026 at 10:24:41 AM

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

by reticulates

8/4/2026 at 10:27:00 AM

> AI has destroyed software margins.

Nobody wants to talk about or reveal the AI or software margins.

Will cause everyone to panic once they see how low the margins are getting year over year.

by colesantiago

8/4/2026 at 11:56:12 AM

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.

by jgalt212

8/4/2026 at 10:40:06 AM

that cant be right if so they got an excellent deal ...$1BN cash (!)

by monkeydust

8/4/2026 at 10:44:08 AM

Deals of this type are usually cash free and debt free. The cash went to the shareholders. Hence the implied valuation of $2.5B.

by fra

8/4/2026 at 10:35:38 AM

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 Anthropic announced something.

by shubhamjain

8/4/2026 at 12:09:01 PM

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.

by minraws

8/4/2026 at 10:26:33 AM

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.

by katspaugh

8/4/2026 at 12:33:01 PM

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."

by serial_dev

8/4/2026 at 10:43:31 AM

Did users leave for other products/solutions?

by darkwater

8/4/2026 at 10:46:26 AM

Luma is the current version of that idea so yes.

by mosura

8/4/2026 at 10:48:15 AM

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

by DetroitThrow

8/4/2026 at 10:52:01 AM

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.

by senko

8/4/2026 at 9:13:52 PM

There is also Partiful

by financetechbro

8/4/2026 at 10:59:38 AM

Cool that there is something else. There was also EventBrite but I guess that got enshittified as well. Anyway my question was more in the realm of: if people stays, their play works. Not justifying the modus operandi, just stating that there is indeed space for Bending Spoons' MO.

Not all the cool hipster SV tech startups end up being a planetary success, some of them end up in this zombie state.

by darkwater

8/4/2026 at 11:08:01 AM

And yet, with all the promise of vibecoding and AI, nobody has created a clone that undercuts it in price.

by listenallyall

8/4/2026 at 10:29:01 AM

Bending Spoons is where products go to die.

by cagataygurturk

8/4/2026 at 11:01:39 AM

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.

by dbbk

8/4/2026 at 11:58:21 AM

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.

by rchaud

8/4/2026 at 10:32:54 AM

I'd rather Bending Spoons than Broadcom. I can still use Komoot but I can't even access my license codes from VMWare.

by tonyedgecombe

8/4/2026 at 10:43:18 AM

Ive been happy with all the improvements they are making to Komoot do far.

by bwb

8/4/2026 at 10:51:24 AM

I used it this we and I found it's really worst than one year ago. In detail: - It was blocking my phone, and one time I had to restart it - It's VERY hard now to find my planned trips

But maybe this is because I do a very basic usage. Uninstalled, though.

by piraccini

8/4/2026 at 2:05:08 PM

I'm suprised, as nothing was changed around saved trips or collections. Same UX as always there.

I'm a heavy user; I use it to plan 3-week-long trips and another month-long trip every year. It has improved, and they do a ton of user interviews to improve it. So far I've been happy.

I'm not happy they fired the old team, but I put that on the sellers and I don't know what was going on there or the company's finances.

by bwb

8/4/2026 at 6:11:10 PM

I have lately seen steady improvements in Evernote.

by TMWNN

8/4/2026 at 10:40:55 AM

$725M@11B Series F 2021 Dec

$270M@5.8B Series E 2021 Mar

$185M@2.6B Series D 2020 Sep

$100M@1.1B Series C 2018 Nov

$52M@152M Series B 2018 Mar

by dustingetz

8/4/2026 at 10:41:55 AM

>Bending Spoons said Airtable's current net cash position implies an equity value of about $2.25 billion.

Bending Spoons must have amazing negotiaters to strike such a bargain.

We should send them to Iran to negotiate the peace deal.

by v5v3

8/4/2026 at 10:56:31 AM

I don't think this is quite accurate. The main question is how much revenue does Sortable bring in each year and after all expenses, how much cash flow does Airtable generate for its owners every year? I am positive it is nowhere near a billion dollars a year. If we roughly say it is annual recurring revenue of USD 0.5B a year, now the question is how much can bending spoon choke airtable neck forcing it to reduce expenses without meaningfully reducing revenue.

by collabs

8/4/2026 at 4:57:44 PM

> We should send them to Iran to negotiate the peace deal.

I laughed so hard. But I mean seriously...

by ergocoder

8/4/2026 at 10:52:00 AM

Bending Spoons strategy can be summarized in the following plan:

- Make offers so low that - if anyone were to accept the deal, they're desperate/greedy enough to take it - hike price and limit features - people who do not have the capacity to switch will bear the cost - bleed out remaining customers

If it works, it works. They're basically betting against the amount of business depth that exists in the world

by ramon156

8/4/2026 at 11:03:00 AM

>Make offers so low...

Yes, all the company execs at Airtable and the VCs and their lawyers and finance guys and advisors are stupid and were incapable of fielding rival offers...

Businesses tend to sell for their market value at that point in time.

by v5v3

8/4/2026 at 9:59:46 AM

Expect entshittification of Airtable after the acquisition.

by mertbio

8/4/2026 at 10:02:50 AM

Airtable has got too expensive for all the weird limitations you end up either writing tons of weird hacks around or paying another sass product to fix for you because airtable don't want to engineer a solution.

Can't say it'll be hugely missed whatever they do at this point.

by weego

8/4/2026 at 10:21:47 AM

This goes for almost all software.

'entshittification' in software is pretty much almost a standard.

Software and businesses that goes through these stages:

Venture Capital, Private Equity, Acquisitions, Ads / Sponsors, Raising Prices due to competition, etc.

Always get enshittified.

by colesantiago

8/4/2026 at 10:47:18 AM

>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 what they were doing. He then sold the business to another owner and he completely changed out the crew to kids that barely look 18 years old. The young inexperienced techs didn't have the skills to diagnose anything on their own. They always had to phone the home office and use their smartphones to send video/photos of what they're looking at to the more knowledgeable technician at the office. That way, the senior guy sitting at the desk can walk them through what to do next. That's when I realized the financial game the new owner was playing: hire new kids that just completed their 3-month HVAC tech certificate for cheap wages but still charge the same high prices that the old owner was charging for experienced techs. And only pay for one expensive senior tech back at the office to be a "shared resource" for all the clueless techs out in the field. That type of "enshittification" didn't require venture capital, or private equity, or ads. The common pattern of degrading a product or service has the same thing in common ... humans.

The vast majority of enshittification is not caused by private equity or ads.

by jasode

8/4/2026 at 7:03:16 PM

> It's really every category of commercial activity.

I'm not going to defend capital's ability to ruin things, but this is framing is not helpful. Enshittification as it was described by Cory Doctorow, who invented the term, requires two additional things:

1. A platform that tries to attract both producers and consumers. Amazon is the canonical example. The platform does what it can to attract enough consumers that producers have to use the platform to reach them. Then it squeezes out the value to the producers (e.g., hiking acquisition fees, etc.; competing with them and underselling them with cheaper alternatives). The final step is to destroy the value to the consumer, by degrading quality and increasing price. By this time, neither producers nor consumers have many levers to fight back.

2. Non-physical pricing levers. Enshittification requires the ability to observe consumer behavior and jigger pricing at great speed. We see this in Amazon again; ridesharing apps introduced surge pricing; ads are priced according to what platforms know about you. In a physical store, the logistical cost of changing the price of goods is nontrivial, so we don't see the same sort of gaming there.

Enshittification is a novel and illuminating concept, so we need to be careful not to let it turn into some vague "things got worse" meaning.

by spenuke

8/4/2026 at 7:50:21 PM

>Enshittification as it was described by Cory Doctorow, who invented the term,

Cory Docotor didn't invent the term. He just made it more popular. Others used it at least 9 years before he did to describe "web design", and 3 years prior to describe the U.K. : https://www.oed.com/dictionary/enshittification_n?tab=meanin...

>Enshittification is a novel and illuminating concept, so we need to be careful not to let it turn into

The gp I replied to already used "enshittification" in a more general way to describe "almost all software". Most software out there is not the platforms that have the 2 factors you listed. I was just going going along with the conversation.

As far as policing the usage of "enshittification", you've got an uphill battle because people like the way it sounds and tend to use it as a spicy word to talk about anything getting worse. They're not going to research what Cory Doctorow was talking about and doublecheck to see if matches exactly what he was trying to describe. E.g. See it used to complain about "public libraries", "policing", "tech jobs", etc: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=enshittification

by jasode

8/4/2026 at 11:47:34 AM

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.

by ldayley

8/4/2026 at 12:07:15 PM

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.

by jasode

8/4/2026 at 10:32:40 AM

Enshitification is a problem when the power structures are not in the user's favour.

by rightbyte

8/4/2026 at 10:42:12 AM

It's also a byproduct of the most successful user acquisition model to be honest.

Getting users is hard, especially on the Internet where your audience is global, and competition is fierce. Word of mouth or user advocacy has always been the best cost-to-value marketing tool.

So starting out by offering things for free or at a loss has been the go-to strategy forever.

But (as we all know) that's not sustainable, so there's pretty much nowhere to go but down, from a value-to-user perspective.

by sbarre

8/4/2026 at 3:09:04 PM

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.

by browningstreet

8/4/2026 at 10:12:32 AM

Airtable is worth "just" $1.3B? I see (or used to see) it almost everywhere; why such a low valuation?

by moinism

8/4/2026 at 10:22:37 AM

I’ve always felt like their money went into marketing, not actual capabilities. It still feels like a Fisher-Price tier platform imo.

by sithadmin

8/4/2026 at 10:44:29 AM

That's an interesting perspective..

I feel like everyone I know/knew who was really into Airtable was pretty sophisticated and used it for complex data wrangling that was beyond the typical tools they had access to.

But they were often solo operators for that data because whatever they were wrangling wasn't worth putting into a database or investing in more robust tools (from a company perspective)..

So perhaps you are correct.

by sbarre

8/4/2026 at 10:25:31 AM

Stripe about to acquire OpenRouter for $10B, and Airtable is only ~1/10th of OpenRouter???

by bodash

8/4/2026 at 4:59:10 PM

The difference is an aggressively growing and profitable business vs. stagnant-at-best-degrowth-at-worst business.

by ergocoder

8/4/2026 at 10:37:49 AM

What is the best open source alternatives of Airtable?

by alaminopu

8/4/2026 at 10:45:30 AM

I am using Baserow (https://baserow.io/) happily.

by kotnik

8/4/2026 at 11:01:39 AM

Thanks for the suggestions

by alaminopu

8/4/2026 at 2:17:22 PM

I've heard good things about https://teable.ai/ for airtable-like flexibility. With more standardized CRM scenarios I'm going to try https://twenty.com/ with the next opportunity

by dmblit

8/4/2026 at 11:39:17 AM

Fibery is free for small team (but not an open source).

by tablet

8/4/2026 at 9:55:09 AM

That’s a bold move in a vibe coding world.

by JSR_FDED

8/4/2026 at 10:50:23 AM

Kind of amazing Airtable couldn’t turn vibe coding in Airtable itself into something worth charging for.

But they have had a distinct lack of imagination for a very long time.

by mosura

8/4/2026 at 9:59:11 AM

On top of that, isn't Bending Spoons famous for enshittify anything they buy to squeeze every single cent they can? Meaning that their fame would push even more companies/people to do a vibecoded replacement with just the features they need.

by marcyb5st

8/4/2026 at 10:10:06 AM

Their MO is switching to maintenance mode and running services with skeleton crew. I am not sure if it will work in area exposed to AI, where everyone is by now used to monthly updates and quarterly product releases.

by Good4boothee

8/4/2026 at 10:24:06 AM

There is a lot of inertia to overcome to migrate away from a product like this. My guess is they will be able to milk this for a long time.

by tonyedgecombe

8/4/2026 at 10:19:08 AM

Doesn't matter, has to last and pump the bending stock for the next years, products and money don't matter.

by epolanski

8/4/2026 at 10:36:24 AM

Well, you all know what this means... RIP Airtable

by KomoD

8/4/2026 at 11:08:08 AM

Bending Spoons list of taking over companies is huge:

2026: Airtable

2025: Eventbrite, AOL, Vimeo, Brightcove, Komoot

2024: WeTransfer, Issuu, Hopin, Meetup, Mosaic Group

2023: Evernote

2022: Filmic Pro

2021: Remini

2018: Splice

by HelloUsername

8/4/2026 at 10:52:16 AM

Super silly of me to ask but how does Bending Spoons make money in all of this? Is it the "fire all American devs and save costs with cheaper Italians" schtick or is there something else?

I don't see how Airtable makes money on its own.

by muragekibicho

8/4/2026 at 10:56:54 AM

Having read their IPO prospectus, my reading - They buy a company which they feel has a sticky product for its loyal userbase and then integrate as many of its common services into its in-house platform e.g. data

They then fire nearly all of the existing new companies staff and think of all the ways they can maximally monetise the existing userbase. Growing the product via investing in it isn't a priority, revenue stream is.

They get a lot of stick, but in fairness they are up front about their business model; they don't hide the fact that they are going to fire most people, unlike traditional private equity firms who make false promises.

by v5v3

8/4/2026 at 11:03:07 AM

That goes a long way yes. Most of these products have built up to hundreds or maybe thousands of engineers over the years, and if you can keep it going with just a handful in Italy, that is a serious cost optimisation.

by dbbk

8/4/2026 at 10:54:22 AM

They also hike the price so significantly most people stop using it. See meetup.com for example.

by DetroitThrow

8/4/2026 at 12:49:32 PM

Feels like the founding team is moving on to a different product entirely, they were building something called hyperagent and focusing all of their efforts on

by htrp

8/4/2026 at 11:19:04 AM

I was sad when Airtable bought Airplane.dev because that was a dirty move they pulled. Now let’s see if that’s how they get treated.

by JoeBOFH

8/4/2026 at 7:49:27 PM

Airplane was an awesome product, but I think that was basically just an aquihire. I don't think Airplane had built a sustainable business.

by acjohnson55

8/4/2026 at 10:50:48 AM

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 just the moment to remind ourselves not to be stuck with it.

by dmblit

8/4/2026 at 12:40:08 PM

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.

by 0gs

8/4/2026 at 10:25:39 AM

[dead]

by bram2w