Bending Spoons closes $1.285bn Airtable deal, its first buy since IPO

Bending Spoons has completed its $1.285bn all-cash acquisition of Airtable, closing a deal it first struck in early August. The purchase, finalised on September 4, is the Milan-based company's first since it listed on Nasdaq on July 1 under the ticker BSP.

Airtable combines spreadsheet and database features so companies can build internal tools and manage workflows without writing code. More than 500,000 organisations use it, including a large share of the Fortune 100, and its annual recurring revenue had grown past $480m by the middle of this year, up more than a fifth from a year earlier.

Under the terms disclosed by Bending Spoons, it bought all of Airtable's issued and outstanding shares for cash. Goldman Sachs Bank Europe and J.P. Morgan advised Bending Spoons on financing, with Willkie Farr & Gallagher as legal counsel and EY Advisory handling diligence. Airtable was advised by Latham & Watkins and AXOM Partners.

A buyer with a pattern

Bending Spoons has spent more than a decade buying digital products, rebuilding their technology and interfaces, and reinvesting the proceeds into further deals. The company says it has never sold off a material business since it started this approach in Milan in 2013, when founders Luca Ferrari, Matteo Danieli, Francesco Patarnello and Luca Querella began assembling what has become a sprawling stable of consumer and productivity brands.

Airtable now sits alongside Evernote, Vimeo, WeTransfer, AOL, Brightcove, Tractive and Eventbrite, the ticketing platform Bending Spoons bought for $500m in a deal that closed in March. Across its businesses, the company counts more than a billion registered users and over 400 million monthly active users.

Luca Ferrari, Bending Spoons' chief executive and co-founder, said the company intends to keep Airtable's growth going by putting money into its product, support and sales teams. "Teams can bring all their data, context, and AI agents together in one place, shape their workflows around their specific needs, and progressively expand their use of the platform over time," he said, adding that the focus now would be on "investing heavily in Airtable's product, customer support, and go-to-market capabilities."

Airtable co-founder Howie Liu struck a similar note about the handover. "I'm confident Bending Spoons has the resources and long-term perspective to help Airtable continue delivering exceptional value to its customers and deliver greater results than ever before," he said.

Why the timing matters

The deal is notable mostly for its timing. Bending Spoons priced its Nasdaq listing at $29 a share on June 30, giving it an $18.4bn valuation, and within five weeks had struck the agreement to buy Airtable. That sequence suggests the IPO was raised, at least in part, to fund exactly this kind of acquisition rather than simply to cash out early backers.

It also marks a shift in the scale and type of company Bending Spoons is prepared to buy. Most of its earlier deals, including Evernote and WeTransfer, were consumer-facing tools with large but price-sensitive user bases. Airtable is an enterprise and team-productivity product competing with the likes of Notion and Monday.com, and it was generating hundreds of millions in recurring revenue before the sale, giving Bending Spoons a far larger revenue base to apply its turnaround playbook to than most of its past targets.

Bending Spoons has said its most recent financial outlook, issued on August 13, did not include any contribution from Airtable, and that it will update guidance once the business is folded into its reported results. For European founders watching the roll-up model scale into enterprise software, the next few quarters of Airtable's numbers inside Bending Spoons will be the real test of whether the approach travels beyond the consumer apps that built the company's reputation.