Bending Spoons has agreed to acquire Airtable at an enterprise value of $1.285 billion, moving the Milan technology group’s acquisition model into enterprise workflow software as SaaS companies rebuild products and cost structures around artificial intelligence.

The cash transaction implies an equity value of approximately $2.25 billion once Airtable’s existing net cash and cash equivalents are included. Regulatory approval and other customary conditions remain outstanding, with completion expected later in 2026 and the two companies continuing to operate independently until then.

Airtable combines spreadsheet-style interfaces with database and application-building tools, allowing companies to create workflows without developing conventional software from scratch. Bending Spoons said the business had reached annual recurring revenue of about $480 million by June, growing more than 20% year on year, while Airtable says more than 500,000 organisations use the platform, including 80% of the Fortune 100.

The acquisition is Bending Spoons’ first since its Nasdaq listing on 1 July and extends a portfolio that already includes AOL, Brightcove, Eventbrite, Evernote, komoot, Vimeo, and WeTransfer. Airtable is the most conspicuously enterprise-focused addition to a strategy built around buying established technology products and then changing how they are organised, developed, and monetised.

An acquisition model enters enterprise SaaS

Bending Spoons describes itself more like an operating company than a conventional software holding group. After an acquisition, it says changes can include reorganising teams, rebuilding technology, redesigning interfaces, accelerating product development, and altering marketing and monetisation, while shared technology and organisational capabilities are reused across the portfolio.

AI now occupies a prominent place in that playbook as both a product technology and an operating tool. Airtable arrives while enterprise software companies are under pressure to demonstrate that generative and agentic AI can do more than add assistant features, particularly as customers scrutinise software budgets and expect automation to replace at least some manual configuration work.

Airtable’s original appeal was that operational teams could build databases, internal applications, and workflow systems without waiting for dedicated engineering resources. Generative AI lowers that barrier again by allowing users to describe processes, interfaces, and automations conversationally, although the same technology also creates competition from platforms capable of generating lightweight business applications directly from prompts.

The company is therefore both an asset and a test case for Bending Spoons. Airtable already sits inside business-critical workflows at large organisations, giving an acquirer a substantial recurring-revenue base and embedded customer relationships, while its product category is being reshaped by AI systems that can automate more of the work previously handled through configurable no-code tools.

Bending Spoons says AI is often central to both its vision for an acquired product and the implementation of its operating changes. In Airtable’s case, however, those changes would reach into software used to coordinate marketing operations, product work, project tracking, data management, and other processes where reliability, integrations, permissions, and institutional knowledge can be more important than rapid interface changes.

The transaction also illustrates an unusual direction of travel for European technology capital. Bending Spoons has grown into an acquirer of globally recognised software brands rather than following the more familiar pattern in which a European technology company itself becomes a target for a larger US buyer.

Airtable remains headquartered in the United States, but strategic control would move to an Italian-listed group with an explicit model of acquiring and operating digital products over long periods. That does not make the purchase a simple European success story, since Airtable raised substantial venture capital during an era when private software valuations were considerably more aggressive.

The proposed price reflects a market in which recurring revenue is now being weighed more closely against profitability, growth durability, and the cost of continuing to develop AI-intensive products. The distinction between the $1.285 billion enterprise value and the approximately $2.25 billion implied equity value is also material because Airtable holds a substantial net cash position.

Existing customers should initially see little change because both businesses will remain independent until completion. More consequential questions begin afterwards, when Bending Spoons applies a method it openly describes as involving deep operational transformation to software embedded across hundreds of thousands of organisations.

Airtable co-founder Howie Liu has framed its next stage around becoming an AI-native platform, while Bending Spoons says it intends to invest for the long term and expand the range of work handled inside Airtable. Achieving both will require more than adding model access to an existing interface, since enterprise AI increasingly depends on permissions, data quality, integrations, governance, and automated actions that organisations can audit and control.

The acquisition places Bending Spoons in a different operating environment from much of its consumer and media-oriented portfolio. Airtable carries the recurring revenue, integration burden, and customer expectations of enterprise software, and the value of the deal will depend on whether the Italian group can improve those economics without weakening the characteristics that made organisations embed the product in the first place.