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Bending Spoons makes first post-IPO acquisition with $1.3B Airtable deal
- JSR_FDED 2mo agoThat’s a bold move in a vibe coding world.
- marcyb5st 2mo agoOn 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.
- Good4boothee 2mo agoTheir 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.
- epolanski 2mo agoDoesn't matter, has to last and pump the bending stock for the next years, products and money don't matter.
- tonyedgecombe 2mo agoThere 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.
- Doctor_Fegg 2mo agoBending Spoons are all in on AI development. Look at Komoot’s release cadence but also the skyrocketing number of bug reports in the Komoot subreddit.
- mosura 2mo agoKind 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.
- mertbio 2mo agoExpect entshittification of Airtable after the acquisition.
- weego 2mo agoAirtable 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.
- colesantiago 2mo agoThis 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.
- rightbyte 2mo agoEnshitification is a problem when the power structures are not in the user's favour.
- sbarre 2mo agoIt'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.
- jasode 2mo ago>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.
- moinism 2mo agoAirtable is worth "just" $1.3B? I see (or used to see) it almost everywhere; why such a low valuation?
- sithadmin 2mo agoI’ve always felt like their money went into marketing, not actual capabilities. It still feels like a Fisher-Price tier platform imo.
- sbarre 2mo agoThat'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.
- minraws 2mo agoI 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 $1.4B (total latest around 770M) in funding I am not sure for what?? and had ~1B in cash (according to some online sources)?? Now I have no idea what this is even about, maybe all investors wanted out?
- elias_t 2mo agoProbably they are getting eaten by new AI integrations and the numbers don’t look good. It’s strange, I thought they were in pole position to integrate into vibe coded apps with bolt and co. Maybe be a strategy issue?
- v5v3 2mo agoIt's used by non technical people so not sure AI is the competition. Perhaps Notion and all the project planning apps like Linear, ClickUp, Asana?
- elias_t 2mo ago> It's used by non technical people so not sure AI is the competition. I mean yes but most of them are vibe coding apps now > Perhaps Notion and all the project planning apps like Linear, ClickUp, Asana? Most probably, but their market share must have free fall for such valuation
- sodastar 2mo agoyou'd be amazed how little people are vibe coding their apps to have alternatives. I mean i recently did for a club, but other clubs are still buying the SaaS-solution for 250$ a year, while having more members and i'd assume at least 1 technical person, that knows what they are doing.
- reticulates 2mo agoARR has always been a bullshit number but it is an especially bullshit number nowadays because AI has destroyed software margins.
- bodash 2mo agoStripe about to acquire OpenRouter for $10B, and Airtable is only ~1/10th of OpenRouter???
- ergocoder 2mo agoThe difference is an aggressively growing and profitable business vs. stagnant-at-best-degrowth-at-worst business.
- bram2w 2mo ago[dead]
- katspaugh 2mo agoAfter 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.
- darkwater 2mo agoDid users leave for other products/solutions?
- mosura 2mo agoLuma is the current version of that idea so yes.
- DetroitThrow 2mo agoyes, _every_ event I go uses Luma or something else nowadays.
- senko 2mo agoI'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.
- financetechbro 2mo agoThere is also Partiful
- fragmede 2mo agoWhich has ties to Palantir
- sunnybeetroot 2mo agoApple invites?
- cagataygurturk 2mo agoBending Spoons is where products go to die.
- tonyedgecombe 2mo agoI'd rather Bending Spoons than Broadcom. I can still use Komoot but I can't even access my license codes from VMWare.
- bwb 2mo agoIve been happy with all the improvements they are making to Komoot do far.
- piraccini 2mo agoI 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.
- bwb 2mo agoI'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.
- dbbk 2mo agoMaybe 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.
- KomoD 2mo agoWell, you all know what this means... RIP Airtable
- alaminopu 2mo agoWhat is the best open source alternatives of Airtable?
- tablet 2mo agoFibery is free for small team (but not an open source).
- kotnik 2mo agoI am using Baserow (https://baserow.io/ https://baserow.io/) happily.
- alaminopu 2mo agoThanks for the suggestions
- leejoramo 2mo agoLook at Grist. You maybe justly concerned for it being an open source project that is backed by one small company that sells hosted plans. The difference is that Grist is a core part of the French Government’s open source web applications La Suite https://www.getgrist.com/ https://www.getgrist.com/ https://lasuite.numerique.gouv.fr/produits/grist https://lasuite.numerique.gouv.fr/produits/grist
- meetingthrower 2mo agoSecond Grist it is very cool we use a lot of it. You can run python as a column/ cell and it doesn't have a lot of the limitations of Airtable. Usage tiers are ridiculously large. Free api. I am almost hoping they charge more so they stay in business.
- maffulli 2mo agoThanks for the mention (I work at Grist)! We want to stay in business, indeed. How much shall we charge? :)
- dustingetz 2mo ago$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
- v5v3 2mo ago>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.
- collabs 2mo agoI 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.
- ergocoder 2mo ago> We should send them to Iran to negotiate the peace deal. I laughed so hard. But I mean seriously...
- dmblit 2mo agoPeople 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.
- 0gs 2mo agoi 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.
- ramon156 2mo agoBending 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
- v5v3 2mo ago>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.
- muragekibicho 2mo agoSuper 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.
- DetroitThrow 2mo agoThey also hike the price so significantly most people stop using it. See meetup.com for example.
- v5v3 2mo agoHaving 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.
- dbbk 2mo agoThat 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.
- everfrustrated 2mo agoThey look for companies which got fat on free money with impossible valuations which are dead ducks. The free money period ended so they can't raise more money and if they do it will be a substantial down valuation so investors won't approve it as it would cristalise a loss on their portfolio. These companies all pay insanely high silicon valley wages and deliver very little actual product development velocity for the wage costs involved. The founders don't have the b**s to do the necessary haircuts themselves so they sell. Bending spoons takes the reputation hit that the founder should have taken and makes severe cuts. BS then rationalises the roadmap, and either keeps it alive or invests into it depending on expected return. Nothing particularly revolutionary other than they are an execution machine.
- HelloUsername 2mo agoBending 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
- JoeBOFH 2mo agoI 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.
- acjohnson55 2mo agoAirplane was an awesome product, but I think that was basically just an aquihire. I don't think Airplane had built a sustainable business.
- v5v3 2mo agoBending Spoons IPO raised $1.68bn so taking away IPO fees and they have in effect spent all of it on 1 acquisition https://www.axios.com/2026/07/01/bending-spoons-ipo-pricing https://www.axios.com/2026/07/01/bending-spoons-ipo-pricing
- lormayna 2mo agoAny suggestion to migrate away from Airtable?
- MauniVilla 2mo agoBaserow
- lormayna 2mo agoUnfortunately it seems it not supporting email sending out of the box
- jamessb 2mo agoPossibly grist https://www.getgrist.com/blog/grist-v-airtable/ https://www.getgrist.com/blog/grist-v-airtable/ ?
- anaisconce 2mo agoFYI, Grist has a very good Airtable migration tool. Brings over column types, references, simple formulas, attachments etc: https://www.getgrist.com/airtable-alternative-self-hosted/ https://www.getgrist.com/airtable-alternative-self-hosted/
- tablet 2mo agoIt depends what you need, there are many options these days. https://chatgpt.com/?hints=search&q=Any%20suggestion%20to%20migrate%20away%20from%20Airtable https://chatgpt.com/?hints=search&q=Any%20suggestion%20to%20...?
- Schwink72 2mo agoCheck out Bluetivity. Tons of functionality and easy to use.
- caoxing9 2mo ago[dead]
- htrp 2mo agoFeels 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
- browningstreet 2mo agoI 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.
- mceoin 2mo agoCoda got acquired by Grammarly who then installed Shishir Mehrotra (Coda CEO) as CEO of Grammarly. They then acquired Superhuman Mail and renamed the whole thing Superhuman. They also acquired Rows to bring a formal spreadsheet into the mix to add to their Coda tables and productivity suite. (Well played.) I was very surprised to see Airtable sold for reportedly less than what they raised and had assumed AI tailwinds (easy database GUI) would benefit them well. Presumably, this was insufficient to overcome enterprise revenue headwinds and a chilly SaaS financing market. I do wonder how this might have played differently had their product and API been better engineered as a database for developers through faster read/write and data scale... unnecessary in PLG-focused pre-AI world, but an interesting avenue for agentic growth nonetheless. Tough break for the Airtable team. It was a great product and I have recommended it often to small business owners over the years.
- mceoin 2mo agoCorrection: It looks like they sold for more than raised: https://x.com/haridigresses/status/2084825945609802079?s=20 https://x.com/haridigresses/status/2084825945609802079?s=20
- maffulli 2mo agoYou may want to start looking at alternatives. I work at Grist https://getgrist.com https://getgrist.com, AMA.
- petilon 2mo ago> Omni, their AI agent was terrible What was terrible about it?
- jnyst1985 2mo agoMeetup users were sunk-cost locked in. Airtable’s buyers already have easy alternatives… so that price-hike playbook carries real churn risk imo.
- xavdid 2mo agoBummer. Airtable's a killer product and I've been using and evangelizing it for nearly 10 years at this point. Built whole side projects around it (and its API), plus organized a ton of personal information. I've made some custom integrations too which have just kept working without maintenance for years. I've got fairly regular backups of all my data, but still. Hurts my heart a little. Best case scenario it keeps working without totally jacking up the prices. But also starting to think about long-term alternatives. BaseRow seems reasonable, as does spinning all of my many bases into a single big Django monolith (something I've had in the back of my head for while anyway). But it's been nice not having to micro manage this service. Pretty good mobile app, too. Enjoyed it while it lasted, I guess!
- prennert 2mo agoWhy not simply rebuild what you need with Claude? Airtable seems to me as a prototyping product. Once you know what you want, formulate it as product objectives and ask Claude how it could be implemented from scratch. Dont even give it any ideas about Django. Just ask it what technologies are sensible for what you need, read and verify its answers, lock in a stack, plan your features and implement them. You will be surprised how many things you could not fix in Airtable or where awkward workarounds can be solved much more elegantly if you (or Claude) consider them straight in the design phase. Just make sure to start with your objectives and _maaaybe_ desired workflows to avoid biasing Claude too much and that you end up rebuilding Airtable.
- petilon 2mo ago> Why not simply rebuild what you need with Claude? Claude isn't some magic genie that can give you whatever you ask for. If you need a spreadsheet, it is much easier at this point to start Excel than to ask Claude to write you an Excel.
- peter_d_sherman 2mo ago"Bending Spoons"... never heard about them until now... let' do some research!: Wikipedia: (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bending_Spoons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bending_Spoons) >"Based in Milan, the company acquires products with existing product‑market fit[4][5] (such as AOL, Eventbrite, Evernote, komoot, Meetup, Tractive, Vimeo, and WeTransfer) and manages them for long-term ownership, often increasing revenue and lowering expenses (including by reducing headcount).[6][7] The company employs full-stack developers to rewrite acquired codebases using artificial intelligence, proprietary platform tools, and open-source software (often Python, FastAPI, and TypeScript).[8][9]" Ah! So they're kind of the equivalent of a special kind of Private Equity firm that specifically purchases/manages/improves: Commerical websites, Apps, SaaS'es and other Digital/Software products that already have many users/customers (aka "Product-Market Fit" in business parlance...) Although, arguably, Microsoft, while never called a "Private Equity" firm, sort of did all of that first, with other tech companies, in earlier decades! Well, wait a second now... If memory serves me, then actually Computer Associates did all of that (for software mostly for the Mainframe / Minicomputer markets and related!) even earlier than Microsoft, probably about a decade or so earlier than Microsoft! Anyway, interesting article!
- Avrio15272 2mo ago[dead]