Airtable Just Sold to the Company That Cut Evernote's Staff

Howie Liu spent thirteen years building Airtable into the spreadsheet-database hybrid that quietly runs a huge share of marketing operations: content calendars, campaign trackers, editorial workflows, lightweight CRMs. At its 2021 peak, investors valued the company at more than $11 billion. On August 4, Liu agreed to sell it to Bending Spoons for $1.285 billion in cash, an enterprise value about a ninth of that peak, in the Italian firm’s first deal since listing on Nasdaq in July.

This isn’t a distressed asset. Airtable’s annual recurring revenue was about $480 million as of June 2026, growing over 20% a year, with more than 500,000 organizations as customers, including 80% of the Fortune 100.

Bending Spoons CEO Luca Ferrari framed the deal warmly:

“We’re looking forward to welcoming Airtable into Bending Spoons. Airtable is a pioneering brand reshaping how teams organize data and manage critical workflows.”

If your team is one of those 500,000 organizations, put the price aside and study the buyer’s track record.

Bending Spoons doesn’t build products. It buys well-known software it considers underpriced, and TechCrunch describes the model plainly: it acquires discounted companies, trims staff, streamlines products, and focuses on profitability. The portfolio includes Evernote, WeTransfer, and Vimeo. Within weeks of taking over Evernote in 2023, the company laid off 129 staffers. An Evernote spokesperson called it at the time “a difficult — yet necessary — decision as we pursue our ambitious plans for Evernote,” noting the app had been unprofitable for years.

Lex Roman, who publishes the growth newsletter Revenue Rulebreaker, put out a warning to Airtable customers the day the deal was announced:

“Price hikes. Mass layoffs. Degraded products. Reduced service. Their portfolio is a graveyard of apps you used to use.”

Roman’s read on the structure of the deal is the useful part:

“This isn’t a normal acquisition, nor is it a VC investment. It’s a private equity buyout from a firm with a track record of gutting companies.”

Roman advises Airtable users to work out an exit plan within two to three months, before the deal closes and any pricing changes land.

Here’s why this deal happened, and why more like it are coming. Airtable raised more than $1.4 billion in venture money against that $11 billion peak valuation. The business that actually emerged, $480 million in recurring revenue with solid but unspectacular growth, can’t return that money at venture multiples. So the investors sold at a discount to a buyer whose whole model is running software companies lean: fewer people, tighter free tiers, higher prices, AI doing more of the operating work. Bending Spoons went public in July at an $18 billion valuation on exactly that pitch. There’s a long list of 2021-vintage martech and workflow tools sitting in the same gap between valuation and revenue, and there’s now a public company with fresh currency shopping that list.

For marketing teams, the exposure is specific. Airtable is rarely the tool anyone budgeted for carefully. It spread bottom-up, a free base here, a $20-a-seat team plan there, until the campaign calendar, the asset tracker, and the influencer database all lived in it. Tools that spread that way are exactly where a new owner finds pricing power, because switching costs are high and nobody negotiated protections into a contract. If the Evernote pattern holds, the free and cheap tiers are where changes show up first.

None of this is certain. Bending Spoons says the deal closes later in 2026, pending regulatory approvals, and Ferrari’s statement promises accelerated innovation, not cuts. The company would say its record proves it keeps products alive that were dying. Evernote still exists. WeTransfer still exists. They’re just different products, at different prices, run by far fewer people.

So treat this the way you treated model churn in your AI stack: as a dependency question, not a news item. Three moves before the deal closes. Export your bases and document the workflows that live in Airtable, because the cost of leaving is knowing what you’d have to rebuild. Check what you’re paying and lock anything contractual now, the way buyers reassessed martech pricing when the model shifted under them. And name the tools in your stack with the same profile, beloved, bottom-up, and owned by investors who need an exit. Airtable won’t be the last one sold to a buyer with a spreadsheet and a staffing plan.