Airtable Valuation and Revenue: $11.7B Peak to $2.25B Sale

Airtable was valued at $11.7 billion in December 2021. Less than five years later, it sold for about a fifth of that.

Bending Spoons announced on August 4, 2026 that it would buy Airtable in an all-cash deal at an enterprise value of $1.285 billion. Adding Airtable's net cash, the deal implies an equity value of about $2.25 billion. The acquisition closed on September 4, 2026, so as of October 2026 Airtable is part of Bending Spoons and has no separate valuation.

The business kept growing the whole time. In the same announcement, Bending Spoons said Airtable's annual recurring revenue was about $480 million as of June 2026, up more than 20% year over year. More than 500,000 organizations use Airtable, including 80% of the Fortune 100.

Before the sale, the market had already marked Airtable down. In January 2026, TechCrunch reported that its shares traded on secondary markets at roughly $4 billion.

Airtable grew because it made a database feel like a spreadsheet, let users spread it through their companies with no sales team, and then sold that usage to large enterprises. It sold for less than its peak because it raised $1.36 billion, most of it at 2020 and 2021 prices, and 20% growth on $480 million of ARR could not justify an $11.7 billion price.

Below is the full timeline, every funding round from seed to Series F, revenue by year, and the 10 moves that explain both the growth and the sale.

Airtable's growth in one table

1. Airtable made a database feel like a spreadsheet

Howie Liu had already sold a company before Airtable. His startup Etacts, an email and contact manager for salespeople, presented at Y Combinator's 2010 Demo Day and was bought by Salesforce a year later, Business Insider reported. Liu was 21.

He stayed at Salesforce for about a year. What he noticed was that most people used spreadsheets to organize information, not to do math. Spreadsheets were built for numbers, and real databases were out of reach for anyone who couldn't code.

Liu started Airtable with Andrew Ofstad and Emmett Nicholas, a trio he later named in his farewell post. The product looked like a spreadsheet but ran on a relational database. Users could link tables together, put images next to text and numbers, and edit with teammates in real time, as SiliconANGLE described at the time.

Airtable launched publicly in early 2015. Three months later, the company wrote that people were using it to preserve ancient languages, track scientific equipment, manage construction projects and plan a U.S. presidential campaign.

That breadth was the point. Airtable had raised a $3 million seed round and then a $7.6 million Series A led by CRV in June 2015, bringing total funding to $10.6 million, SiliconANGLE reported.

2. Airtable stayed horizontal and let users pick the use case

Early investors pushed Airtable to pick one industry. Liu refused.

"Every company decides their own use case," he said in a 2025 talk recapped by Salesforce Ventures, describing the decision to stay horizontal as controversial at the time.

A flexible product has an obvious problem: new users face a blank grid. Airtable's answer was to let existing users show newcomers what to build.

In April 2015, TechCrunch reported that Airtable had added an API and embeddable views that users could share "as simply as you would a YouTube video." In September 2017, Airtable launched Universe, where users published the bases they ran their work on.

Anyone could click, copy and start running those systems. Launch examples included the staffing system used by festival producer Insomniac and the editorial calendar Singularity University used for its content operation.

Each published base showed a stranger exactly how to use Airtable for a specific problem.

3. Airtable grew to $30 million in revenue before hiring sales reps

For its first few years, Airtable had no sales team. Liu said it reached $30 million in revenue through self-serve adoption alone, according to the Salesforce Ventures recap.

The numbers from that period show how fast word of mouth worked. In March 2018, Airtable said more than 30,000 companies used it, 400 of the Fortune 1000 were on the platform, and revenue had grown 500% in 2017.

Eight months later, the count was 80,000. Forbes reported in November 2018 that revenue was on track to jump 400% to $20 million that year, "mostly on word of mouth."

CRV, which led the Series A and co-led the $52 million Series B, wrote in 2018 that Airtable was one of the fastest-growing companies by revenue in its 48-year history.

When Airtable did hire sales reps at around $30 million in revenue, their first job was what Liu called "demand fulfillment." Reps found companies where dozens of teams already paid for Airtable separately and offered to combine them into one contract.

4. Airtable turned tables into apps

A shared table is useful. An app that runs a workflow is harder to replace.

Airtable spent the next few years moving in that direction. With its March 2018 Series B, it launched Blocks, 27 add-ons at launch that let non-coders add SMS, mapping and image recognition to their bases.

In September 2020, alongside its Series D, it announced Airtable Apps, Automations and Sync, Crunchbase News reported. Automations let bases act on their own, and Sync let teams share data across bases.

By its December 2021 Series F, Airtable described itself as "the connected apps platform." The pitch had shifted from a better spreadsheet to software that runs a company's processes.

That shift mattered for revenue. A team tracking a content calendar can switch tools in an afternoon; a department whose whole workflow runs in Airtable cannot.

5. Airtable moved upmarket into the Fortune 100

Bottom-up use got Airtable into large companies. Strategic selling made those accounts big.

Liu has described pitching executives on making Airtable "the system of record" for a whole function, such as all marketing operations. The team also spotted a cluster of product operations teams using Airtable for roadmaps and built targeted selling around it, per the Salesforce Ventures recap.

The results showed up fast. When it raised its Series E in March 2021, Airtable said its enterprise customer base had grown 3.4x in a year, 13,000 net new paid customers had joined, and more than half of the Fortune 1000 used it.

By December 2021, Liu told Bloomberg that about 80% of Fortune 100 companies were paying customers and more than 30% of active users paid. Airtable then had more than 300,000 active customers, including IBM, Hulu and Netflix.

6. Airtable raised $1.36 billion at the top of the market

Investors kept offering money, and Airtable kept taking it.

• Series C, November 2018: $100 million at a $1.1 billion valuation, led by Thrive Capital, Benchmark and Coatue, TechCrunch reported.
• Series D, September 2020: $185 million at a $2.585 billion post-money valuation, led by Thrive, according to TechCrunch.
• Series E, March 2021: $270 million at a $5.77 billion post-money valuation, led by Greenoaks, Airtable announced.
• Series F, December 2021: $735 million at an $11 billion pre-money valuation, led by XN, Airtable announced. Bloomberg put the post-money figure at $11.7 billion.

Liu told Forbes that Greenoaks approached him for the Series E while he wasn't raising, and that Airtable already had roughly $500 million in cash. Nine months later, he told Bloomberg that the Series F "bridges us to profitability" and that Airtable planned to go public in "a couple years."

The company spent to match. Headcount doubled to about 300 during the pandemic, Forbes reported in 2020. Its chief people officer joined in May 2021 with a goal of doubling headcount to 1,000 in 12 months, TechCrunch reported.

The price was steep. Liu put ARR "north of $100 million" at the time of the Series F, and research firm Sacra estimates it was about $156 million, which would make the round roughly 75 times ARR.

7. Airtable cut 40% of staff to chase million-dollar customers

The market turned in 2022, and Airtable cut hard.

In December 2022, Liu told employees Airtable would cut 254 people and shift from a mostly bottom-up product for teams of every size to a company focused on enterprises with at least 1,000 employees. It was about 20% of staff, TechCrunch reported, and the chief revenue officer, chief product officer and chief people officer left the same day.

In September 2023, Airtable cut 237 more people, or 27% of the company, Forbes reported. The cuts hit hardest in teams that sold to and served smaller customers.

"We want to consistently get customers with million-dollar-plus spend rates, versus supporting lots of little ten-thousand-dollar customers from a sales touch standpoint," Liu told Forbes.

The same day, Liu's memo described Airtable as "a cash flow positive business with a large capital reserve."

The bet paid off on efficiency. By July 2024, Liu told Forbes that more than 25 customers spent at least $1 million a year, several spent at least $5 million, and revenue was in the "hundreds of millions" while clearing the Rule of 40. He said on The MAD Podcast in May 2024 that Airtable would have ended 2023 as a top-decile grower among public SaaS companies.

8. Airtable "refounded" itself as AI-native

Airtable's first big AI product was Cobuilder, launched in July 2024, which generated apps from a text prompt. Liu called it the company's biggest release in five years, according to Forbes.

The larger move came on June 24, 2025. In a letter to customers, Liu said Airtable was treating the launch as "a refounding moment for the company."

The centerpiece was Omni, an AI assistant that builds apps by conversation using Airtable's existing tables, interfaces and automations. Liu pitched it against vibe-coding tools such as Cursor, v0, Replit and Lovable, arguing that apps built on Airtable's components would be reliable enough for production business use.

Airtable also put field agents inside apps, so AI could run the same task across thousands of records. It added AI and a bundle of AI credits to every plan, including the free plan, which Liu called "disrupting our own pricing model."

The company changed how it worked, too. Liu told Lenny's Podcast in August 2025 that he had become an "IC CEO" who coded daily, and that Airtable had split into a fast-thinking team shipping AI features weekly and a slow-thinking team handling long-term infrastructure.

By October 2025, Airtable's AI tools were active for "the vast majority" of customers, Upstarts reported. Liu also said Airtable had reached $100 million in annualized free cash flow, held nearly $1 billion on its balance sheet, and scored above 50 on the Rule of 40.

9. Airtable added AI agents as separate products

Omni lived inside Airtable. Liu's next bets sat outside it.

In October 2025, Upstarts reported that David Azose, who led engineering for ChatGPT's business products at OpenAI, had joined as CTO. Airtable also bought DeepSky, an AI research agent, bringing over its three founders and about a dozen staff.

DeepSky had raised about $40 million, and Liu called it Airtable's largest acquisition to date, according to Upstarts. He said the deal could save 6 to 12 months of building time.

In January 2026, DeepSky's work became Superagent, Airtable's first standalone product in 13 years. TechCrunch reported that it sends specialist agents to research a question in parallel and returns an interactive report, with planned pricing from $20 to $200 per user per month.

"We're not trying to optimize for profit margin right now," Liu told TechCrunch. He added that Airtable still had about half of the $1.4 billion it had raised in the bank and was "throwing off cash."

A month later, Liu announced Hyperagent, a platform for agents that run long tasks in their own computing environment, learn skills and work inside Slack as coworkers. It was onboarding early users.

10. Airtable sold the core business and kept the agent bet separate

Airtable had cash, no need to raise, and a profitable business. It still sold.

The buyer was Bending Spoons, the Milan-based owner of Evernote, Vimeo, WeTransfer and other apps. It had listed on Nasdaq on July 1, 2026 and bought AOL and Eventbrite earlier that year, according to its announcement.

One detail sits in the SEC filing. Before signing, Airtable transferred the assets and liabilities of its "Hyperagent" business line to a separate company, Hyperagent Inc., so Bending Spoons bought Airtable without it.

When the deal closed on September 4, 2026, Liu wrote that he was stepping down as CEO to work full time on Hyperagent, "now an independent company." He described it as "a small team and early days."

Bending Spoons moved quickly. On October 12, 2026, new product lead Alessandro Savarese wrote that Airtable was "parting ways with a large portion of the pre-acquisition team," while customer plans, prices and the customer-facing team stayed the same.

Bending Spoons did not say how many jobs were cut, Business Insider reported. Airtable had roughly 800 workers before the acquisition, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.

The new plan is narrower: monthly fixes to the core product, an upgraded Omni, a new Airtable Canvas for building custom apps, and more admin controls. Savarese said a small "Speedy Squad" had shipped more than 30 improvements in three weeks.

How fast did Airtable grow?

Airtable has never published audited financials. The numbers below mix company statements, figures the buyer disclosed, and outside estimates, so each is labeled.

Airtable revenue by year

• 2017: Revenue grew 500%, Airtable said (company-stated, no dollar figure).
• 2018: On track for about $20 million in revenue, Forbes reported (reported).
• A few years in: About $30 million in revenue when Airtable hired its first sales reps, Liu said (company-stated, no exact date).
• December 2021: ARR "north of $100 million," Liu told Bloomberg (company-stated); Sacra estimates about $156 million.
• End of 2023: About $375 million in ARR, up 50%, according to a Sacra estimate (estimate). Liu said only that revenue was in the "hundreds of millions."
• End of 2025: About $440 million in ARR, according to a Sacra estimate (estimate).
• June 2026: About $480 million in ARR, up more than 20% year over year, Bending Spoons said (disclosed by the buyer).

The growth rate is the key number. More than 20% growth to $480 million implies ARR of under $400 million in June 2025. That is healthy for a profitable company of Airtable's size, but far from the triple-digit growth of its early years.

Airtable valuation and funding by round

Airtable said the Series F brought its total funding to $1.36 billion. Most reports round that to $1.4 billion.

The gap between the two sale numbers is cash. The $2.25 billion equity value minus the $1.285 billion enterprise value implies about $965 million of net cash, much of it unspent from the 2021 rounds.

That puts the operating business at about 2.7 times its $480 million ARR. The 2021 Series F was priced at roughly 75 times Sacra's estimated ARR at the time.

Airtable's growth loop

At its best, Airtable grew through one loop:

1. One person builds a base to organize their own work.
2. They share it with teammates, embed it, or publish it as a template.
3. Teammates and strangers copy it and build their own.
4. Usage spreads across a company, team by team, on separate accounts.
5. Sales reps consolidate those accounts into one contract.
6. The company makes Airtable the system of record for a whole function.
7. More teams build more apps on it, and the contract grows.

The first four steps cost Airtable almost nothing, which is how it reached $30 million in revenue with no sales team. The 2022 and 2023 restructuring pointed the company at the last three steps and at customers spending $1 million or more a year.

What Airtable did differently

It picked flexibility over a niche

Airtable let users define their own use cases, then sold into the clusters that emerged, such as product operations.

It added sales only after demand existed

Airtable's first reps did not cold-call. They found companies that already had dozens of Airtable accounts and offered to combine them.

It fixed its costs before the money ran out

Airtable cut about 40% of its staff across two rounds while it still had hundreds of millions in the bank. It was cash-flow positive by September 2023 and still held about $965 million of net cash at the sale.

It rebuilt the product for AI instead of adding a chatbot

Omni, field agents and AI on the free plan kept Airtable growing, but they did not bring back the growth rate of 2018.

What could slow Airtable down?

Cheaper ways to build apps. Airtable's original promise was software for people who can't code. Liu himself named Lovable, Replit and Vercel as competitors racing toward the same goal from the other direction, in his October 2025 Upstarts interview.

A smaller team. Bending Spoons cut a large part of the pre-acquisition staff in October 2026. The founder-CEO who led the AI relaunch left to run Hyperagent, and the agent business he was most excited about now sits outside Airtable.

AI costs. Airtable bundled AI credits into every plan, including free, and Liu said in January 2026 he was not optimizing for margin. The new owners now list better visibility over AI credit consumption as an enterprise priority.

Growth rate. At just over 20%, Airtable is growing steadily, not compounding. Bending Spoons says it will invest heavily in Airtable's product, customer support and go-to-market, but it has not given a growth target for Airtable.

Borrowing Airtable's template loop

Airtable's early growth came from users publishing the systems they had built, so each good use case became a way in for the next customer. Okara's Writer Agent drafts strategy-led articles around the use cases your customers already have. Its Reddit Agent finds threads where people ask how to solve that problem and drafts replies you post yourself.

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Frequently asked questions

What is Airtable's valuation?

Airtable no longer has a standalone valuation. Bending Spoons bought it at an enterprise value of $1.285 billion, which implies an equity value of about $2.25 billion including Airtable's net cash, and the deal closed in September 2026. That compares with $11.7 billion after its December 2021 Series F and a reported secondary-market value of about $4 billion in January 2026.

How much did Bending Spoons pay for Airtable?

Bending Spoons paid cash at a $1.285 billion enterprise value. Including Airtable's net cash, the equity value was about $2.25 billion, which is why Bloomberg reported the deal as "$2.3 billion" and TechCrunch as "$1.28 billion." The Hyperagent business was moved out of Airtable before the sale and was not included.

What is Airtable's revenue?

Bending Spoons said Airtable had about $480 million in annual recurring revenue as of June 2026, growing more than 20% year over year. Airtable never published audited revenue. Earlier figures include about $20 million in 2018 (Forbes) and ARR "north of $100 million" in December 2021 (Liu to Bloomberg).

How much funding has Airtable raised?

Airtable raised $1.36 billion across seven rounds, according to the company, often rounded to $1.4 billion. The largest was a $735 million Series F in December 2021 led by XN. Other major backers included CRV, Caffeinated Capital, Thrive Capital, Benchmark, Coatue and Greenoaks.

Who founded Airtable?

Howie Liu, Andrew Ofstad and Emmett Nicholas founded Airtable. Airtable says the company was founded in 2013, though some reports say 2012, and it launched publicly in 2015. Liu was CEO until the Bending Spoons acquisition closed in September 2026, when he left to run Hyperagent.

How many customers does Airtable have?

More than 500,000 organizations use Airtable, including 80% of the Fortune 100, according to the August 2026 acquisition announcement. In July 2024, Liu said more than 25 customers spent at least $1 million a year.

Why did Airtable's valuation fall?

Airtable raised its Series F at roughly 75 times estimated ARR during the 2021 software boom. When growth slowed to around 20% a year, buyers priced it on cash flow rather than growth, and it sold at about 2.7 times ARR.

What is Hyperagent?

Hyperagent is an AI agent platform that Howie Liu announced in February 2026 as a product from Airtable. Before the Bending Spoons deal, it was moved into a separate company, Hyperagent Inc., which Liu now runs full time.

Sources

• Bending Spoons: Bending Spoons has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Airtable for $1.285 billion — August 2026
• SEC: Bending Spoons Form 6-K on the Airtable purchase agreement — August 2026
• Bending Spoons: Bending Spoons completes the acquisition of Airtable — September 2026
• Bending Spoons: Back to bases: What's next at Airtable — October 2026
• TechCrunch: Bending Spoons to buy Airtable for $1.28B — August 2026
• Bloomberg: Bending Spoons to buy software firm Airtable for $2.3 billion — August 2026
• Business Insider: Airtable's new owner is laying off a 'large part' of its team — October 2026
• San Francisco Chronicle: S.F. software company was sold for $1.3 billion. Now it's cutting 'large portion' of its workers — October 2026
• LinkedIn: Howie Liu on stepping down as Airtable CEO — September 2026
• Howie Liu: AGI is here. Now harness it. (Introducing Hyperagent) — February 2026
• TechCrunch: Airtable jumps into the AI agent game with Superagent — January 2026
• Upstarts: Airtable hires CTO from OpenAI, acquires 'superagent' startup DeepSky — October 2025
• Lenny's Newsletter: How we restructured Airtable's entire org for AI — August 2025
• Airtable: The AI-native Airtable has arrived: a letter from our CEO — June 2025
• Salesforce Ventures: Platform evolution in the AI era: insights from Airtable CEO Howie Liu — May 2025
• Forbes: Airtable's new AI tool can generate apps from just a prompt — July 2024
• The MAD Podcast: How Airtable is ushering 500,000 organizations into the era of AI — May 2024
• Sacra: Airtable at $375M ARR — February 2024
• Sacra: Airtable revenue, valuation and funding — 2026
• Airtable: A message from our CEO — September 2023
• Forbes: Unicorn startup Airtable lays off 27% of firm, shifts focus to big clients — September 2023
• Airtable: Read Howie Liu's message to Airtable employees — December 2022
• TechCrunch: Airtable, last valued at $11 billion for its no-code software, lays off over 250 — December 2022
• TechCrunch: Airtable chief revenue officer, chief people officer and chief product officer are out — December 2022
• Airtable: Airtable secures $735M to invest in its connected apps platform — December 2021
• Bloomberg (via Yahoo Finance): Software startup Airtable scores a $11.7 billion valuation — December 2021
• Airtable: Airtable raises $270 million to accelerate enterprise momentum — March 2021
• Forbes: Airtable tops $5.7 billion valuation on growing enterprise sales — March 2021
• TechCrunch: Airtable raises $185M and launches new low-code and automation features — September 2020
• Forbes: Cloud startup Airtable raises $185 million at $2.5 billion valuation — September 2020
• Crunchbase News: Airtable lands $185M Series D — September 2020
• TechCrunch: Airtable, maker of a coding platform for non-techies, raises $100M at a $1.1B valuation — November 2018
• Forbes: Move slow and make things: Airtable's Howie Liu built a $1B software giant — November 2018
• Business Wire: Airtable raises $52 million and launches Airtable Blocks — March 2018
• CRV: Airtable, the application platform that's redefining software — March 2018
• Airtable: Airtable introduces Universe — September 2017
• Airtable: Democratizing the database (Series A announcement) — June 2015
• SiliconANGLE: Airtable gets $7.6M to reimagine the database — June 2015
• TechCrunch: Airtable launches its API and embedded databases — April 2015
• Business Insider: Airtable CEO Howie Liu interview — April 2015