Airtable's sale to Bending Spoons at a fraction of its 2021 peak (see above) is a

Airtable just sold to Bending Spoons for $1.28 billion, according to TechCrunch. That’s a steep drop from the $11 billion valuation it hit in 2021. The reason matters more than the number.

Airtable spent years adding AI features on top of its spreadsheet-database hybrid. Autocomplete, smart fields, workflow suggestions. All useful, all incremental. But when genuinely AI-native tools started appearing, tools built from the ground up to handle workflows without the old table metaphor, Airtable’s premium evaporated. Investors stopped paying a multiple for a horizontal platform that happened to have AI. They wanted products where AI was the structure, not the add-on.

This is the pattern we’re seeing across SaaS. If your core product was designed in 2015 and you’ve been stapling GPT wrappers to it, you’re defending against competitors who started last year with agents and natural language as the foundation. Those products feel different to users. They’re faster to set up, easier to customize, and they don’t make you think in rows and columns when you just want to route an approval or trigger a report.

For business owners, the lesson is straightforward. If you’re evaluating tools, ask whether the AI is cosmetic or structural. If you’re building internal systems, the same logic applies. Bolting a chatbot onto a clunky process doesn’t fix the process. Starting with what you actually need to happen, then using AI to make that simple and fast, is how you avoid rebuilding in two years. That’s the thinking behind what we build into systems like the Omni Command Centre, where automation and intelligence sit at the core, not the edge.

Airtable’s sale isn’t a failure. It’s a signal that the market has moved, and it moved faster than a lot of incumbents expected.