AI Pulse · AI Trends Pulse

Bending Spoons just agreed to buy Airtable for $1.28 billion, a steep drop from the $11 billion valuation Airtable hit in 2021. This is Bending Spoons’ first acquisition since it went public in July, and the deal marks a sharp reality check for a company that was once the poster child of no-code databases.

Airtable still has $480 million in annual recurring revenue and is growing over 20% a year. Those are solid numbers. But the valuation crash tells you what investors now think about growth-stage SaaS companies that haven’t found a clear path to profitability. The 2021 boom rewarded potential. Today’s market rewards unit economics and actual margins.

For business owners, this matters because Airtable is a tool many teams rely on to organize workflows, customer data, and internal processes. Bending Spoons has a track record of acquiring software products, cutting costs, and running them for cash flow. That usually means fewer new features, slower support, and a focus on extracting value rather than building it. If your operations depend on Airtable, you should start thinking about what happens if development slows or pricing changes.

This is also a reminder that the tools you build your business on can change hands fast. Vendor risk is real. One way to manage it is to own more of your own stack, especially the layer that connects your data and automates decisions. That’s the kind of thing we build into an AI command centre, where you control the logic and the integrations, not a third party.

The Airtable deal won’t close overnight, but the direction is clear. Plan accordingly.