Airtable sold for $1.25B. It was once valued at $11.7B!
$480 million in ARR, growing over 20% a year, sold anyway. That should worry more SaaS founders than it will.
Bending Spoons, the Italian company that's been buying up software businesses, is acquiring Airtable in an all-cash deal at an enterprise value of $1.285 billion and an equity value of $2.25 billion. At its 2021 peak, Airtable was valued at over $11.7 billion. Earlier this year, secondary-market trades were already down to around $4 billion, and this deal prices it at roughly 44% below even that figure.
Airtable had around $480 million in annual recurring revenue and was growing at 20% a year at the time of the deal. A lot of the unicorns that were raised at high valuations during the ZIRP era are in the same boat. The valuations have already gotten the reality check they needed, and those not directly competing with Anthropic/OpenAI are finding their exits through PE, or through Bending Spoons, which is PE in different clothes.
Bending Spoons will execute the playbook they ran for Harvest. They will cut costs, reorg, jack up prices, and, in the process, alienate the product's fans while attracting enterprise buyers. SaaS companies in a similar boat will want to either attract Bending Spoons to help them find an exit, or grow faster and find better exits if available in the future.