Capital

Evernote's Owner Just Bought Your Airtable Base

Bending Spoons is paying 1.285 billion dollars for Airtable, a business with about 480 million dollars of recurring revenue. The multiple, not the press release, tells you what happens at your next renewal.

CapitalBy Servola Tech Desk2026-08-044 min read

AI-assisted, edited by humans. | Editor-in-Chief: Leon Soliman | Editorial standards

Evernote's Owner Just Bought Your Airtable Base

Key takeaways

Bending Spoons is paying 1.285 billion dollars in enterprise value for a business with about 480 million dollars of annual recurring revenue, which is 2.7 times revenue, and nobody pays 2.7 times revenue for a company they intend to grow.
The equity value is about 2.25 billion dollars against an enterprise value of 1.285 billion, so roughly 965 million dollars of the cheque is Airtable's own cash going back to Airtable's own shareholders.
Airtable announced an 11 billion dollar valuation in December 2021 on a 735 million dollar round. This deal values the equity at about a fifth of that, and revenue grew over 20 percent in the meantime.
The transaction is expected to close later this year subject to regulatory approval, which means the window to lock a multi-year rate on your current terms closes when the deal does.
Export every business-critical base to a format you can read without Airtable before the close, because the moment your data only opens in one vendor's product, you have no position left to negotiate from.

What was signed on 4 August

Five weeks after taking Bending Spoons public on Nasdaq, Luca Ferrari signed a definitive agreement in Milan to buy Airtable. The terms, published on 4 August, put the enterprise value at 1.285 billion dollars and the implied equity value at approximately 2.25 billion dollars, all cash. Airtable states annual recurring revenue of approximately 480 million dollars as of June 2026, grown by more than 20 percent year on year, across more than 500,000 organisations including 80 percent of the Fortune 100. The transaction is expected to close later this year, subject to required regulatory approvals and customary closing conditions.

This is the group's first acquisition since the listing, and it lands in a portfolio that already holds AOL, Brightcove, Eventbrite, Evernote, Harvest, komoot, Remini, StreamYard, Vimeo and WeTransfer. AOL was acquired in January 2026 and Eventbrite in March. Howie Liu, who co-founded Airtable in 2013, frames the deal as the resources needed to build an AI-native platform. That is the seller's framing and it may well be sincere. It is not the number to read.

The multiple is the forecast

Divide the enterprise value by the recurring revenue and you get 2.68. A software business growing revenue above 20 percent a year, with four fifths of the Fortune 100 on its books, does not change hands at 2.7 times revenue because the buyer expects to compound it. That multiple is what an acquirer pays when the asset it is buying is the installed base rather than the growth curve, and when the plan is to raise the yield on customers who are already there rather than to win new ones.

Bending Spoons has never hidden that this is the model. The group swung from a 112 million dollar loss in the first quarter of 2025 to a 27.5 million dollar profit in the same quarter of 2026, and it did so by tightening how its brands monetise. Evernote users know the shape of it. If you run operations on Airtable, the honest reading of 2.7 times revenue is that your account is now a yield line in someone's model, and the yield has to come from somewhere.

Nearly a billion of the price is Airtable's own money

The gap between the two published numbers is the part worth pausing on. An equity value of about 2.25 billion dollars against an enterprise value of 1.285 billion implies roughly 965 million dollars of net cash sitting on Airtable's balance sheet. Put plainly, about two fifths of the headline price is Airtable's own cash being handed back to Airtable's own shareholders. The business itself is being bought for the 1.285 billion.

That cash pile is also the reason the deal is affordable so soon after the float. Bending Spoons secured a 500 million euro term loan facility backed by SACE, the Italian export credit agency, in a filing dated 28 July 2026. A buyer funding a purchase partly with the target's own balance sheet and partly with export-credit-backed debt is a buyer with a return schedule. Return schedules show up in price lists.

Your leverage expires when the regulators finish

Regulatory review is the only reason nothing changes this month, and that is a gift with an expiry date. Until the deal closes, Airtable is still selling on its own terms and still wants clean renewal numbers to hand over. Ask for a two or three year rate now, in writing, with an explicit cap on per-seat increases and on any reclassification of features between tiers. A vendor that is about to change hands is unusually willing to sign a term that its acquirer will inherit.

Do the unglamorous work in parallel. List every base that a real process depends on, and export each one to CSV or a database dump you can open without Airtable. Check whether your automations call the API and note which ones would break if rate limits tightened. None of that is a prediction that Airtable will get worse. It is what makes the difference between choosing to stay and having to.

Frequently asked questions

Does 2.7 times revenue mean Airtable is in trouble?

No. Airtable's revenue is growing above 20 percent and it has 80 percent of the Fortune 100 as customers. The multiple says something about the buyer's plan, not the product's health. A low multiple on a growing business usually means the seller's investors wanted an exit more than the buyer wanted growth, and Airtable's investors have been waiting since December 2021.

Will prices go up immediately?

Not before the deal closes, and probably not on day one after. The pattern across this group has been gradual: tier restructuring, feature reclassification, and firmer renewal terms rather than a single announced rise. That is precisely why the useful action is to fix your rate in writing now rather than to wait for a price notice.

Is this a European deal or an American one?

Both, and that matters for the review. The buyer is Milan-based and Nasdaq-listed, the target is American, and the financing includes a facility backed by Italy's export credit agency. Required regulatory approvals will therefore be sought in more than one jurisdiction, which is part of why close is guided to later this year rather than within weeks.

A press release tells you what a buyer intends. A multiple tells you what a buyer can afford to be wrong about. At 2.7 times recurring revenue, Bending Spoons cannot afford for Airtable's existing customers to pay less than they do today, and that is the only forecast in this deal you can bank on.

AirtableBending SpoonsSaaS pricingVendor riskRenewalsLow-codeM&A

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