Airtable is being acquired by Bending Spoons: what it means for your bases

On August 4, 2026, Bending Spoons announced it had entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Airtable. The deal values Airtable at an enterprise value of $1.285 billion, which with Airtable's cash balance works out to an equity value of around $2.25 billion. It is expected to close later this year, subject to regulatory approval.

Airtable is not shutting down, and nothing about your bases changes today. But the buyer has a specific and well documented way of running the software it acquires, and if you have a team depending on Airtable it is worth understanding what that pattern has looked like elsewhere.

Disclosure: Breeze publishes this. We make project management software, so we are not a neutral party on whether people should stay with Airtable. We have tried to keep the reporting below factual and sourced, and the honest answer to "should I move" is no for most readers right now. Read it with the bias in mind.

Written August 5, 2026, one day after the announcement. Deal terms and any product changes may have moved on since. Check Airtable's own communications for the current position.

Contents

• What was actually announced
• Who is Bending Spoons
• What happened to Evernote
• Is Airtable shutting down
• Should you move off Airtable
• What to watch for
• FAQ

What was actually announced

The confirmed facts, from Bending Spoons' own announcement and the coverage of it:

• Bending Spoons has entered a definitive agreement to acquire Airtable in an all-cash transaction.
• Enterprise value is $1.285 billion. Equity value is roughly $2.25 billion once Airtable's net cash is included.
• The transaction is expected to close later in 2026, subject to regulatory approvals and customary closing conditions.
• This is Bending Spoons' first acquisition since it listed on Nasdaq on July 1, 2026.
• Airtable's annual recurring revenue was around $480 million as of June 2026, growing over 20% year on year.

Two things are worth noting about those numbers. The deal has not closed, so nothing has legally changed hands yet. And Airtable was last valued privately at around $11.6 billion, so a $1.285 billion enterprise value is a long way down from where the company's paper valuation peaked, even though the business itself is still growing.

Who is Bending Spoons

Bending Spoons is an Italian software company that buys established products and runs them. It owns Evernote, Vimeo, Meetup, WeTransfer, Remini and StreamYard, and in 2026 it added AOL in January and Eventbrite in March. It raised $1.68 billion in its July 2026 IPO and has been explicit that it intends to keep buying.

This is a different kind of acquirer from a strategic buyer. A competitor buying Airtable would be buying the product to fold into their own. Bending Spoons buys products to operate them profitably, which in practice has meant reducing costs and increasing revenue per user on the products it acquires. That is a legitimate business model and the products generally keep running. It is just not the same as being bought by someone who wants to grow your user base.

What happened to Evernote

Evernote is the most documented case, and the one most people will bring up. The sequence after Bending Spoons acquired it in early 2023:

• February 2023: 129 Evernote staff were laid off. Most of the roughly 250 US and Chile based employees had gone by mid year, with operations moved to Europe.
• November 2023: the personal annual plan went from about $69.99 to $129.99, an increase of roughly 86%.
• December 2023: free accounts were capped at 50 notes and one notebook. Existing free users were not grandfathered.
• August 2024: free accounts were further restricted to one device at a time.
• 2025 onwards: plans were restructured again, and the top consumer tier now runs at $249.99 per year.

Evernote did not shut down, and it is still being developed. But the free tier became close to unusable, and paying customers saw large increases. If you want a single sentence for what the Evernote period looked like from a user's seat: the product survived, and it got considerably more expensive to keep using.

It is worth being fair about the differences. Evernote was a struggling consumer product that had lost money for years. Airtable is an enterprise business with $480 million in ARR growing over 20%, sold on annual contracts to companies including a large share of the Fortune 100. Those customers have procurement teams and renewal leverage that individual Evernote subscribers did not. The Evernote playbook is a reasonable thing to watch for, not a prediction.

Is Airtable shutting down?

No. Nothing in the announcement suggests a shutdown, and Bending Spoons' model depends on acquired products continuing to run and generate revenue. Every product it has bought is still operating.

Your bases, automations and integrations work exactly as they did last week. The deal has not even closed yet.

Should you move off Airtable?

For most teams, not right now. There is no announced change to migrate away from, and moving a real Airtable base is genuinely expensive work: linked records, rollups, interfaces and automations do not port cleanly to anything.

The situations where it is reasonable to start looking:

• You are up for renewal in the next few months and were already unsure. This is a fair moment to ask for a longer term at the current rate, or to price the alternatives properly before you sign.
• Your Airtable spend is already uncomfortable. The creator and editor seat split is the most common complaint we hear, and price is the lever Bending Spoons has historically pulled first.
• You were using Airtable as a project tracker rather than a database. In that case the migration cost is much lower than it looks, because you were not really using the relational side. This was worth reconsidering before the acquisition and it still is.

The situation where you should probably stay put is the one where Airtable is doing what it is genuinely best at: acting as a relational database with a friendly interface, feeding interfaces and automations that would take months to rebuild. Nothing has changed about how well it does that job.

Whatever you decide, export a backup. That is sensible practice during any ownership change and costs an afternoon.

If you do want to price the options, we keep a list of Airtable alternatives sorted by which job Airtable was actually doing for you, since a database replacement and a project tracker replacement are two different searches. Teams that were using Airtable mainly to track work rather than to model data usually find the move much simpler than they expected.

What to watch for

Concrete signals over the next six to twelve months, in rough order of how early they tend to appear:

• Closing. Until the deal clears regulatory approval, nothing is final.
• Headcount and support. Response times and the departure of people you deal with are usually the first thing customers notice.
• Plan restructuring. Watch for renamed tiers rather than headline price rises. Repackaging is how most of the change actually arrives.
• The free tier. Historically the first thing to be tightened, and the clearest early indicator.
• Roadmap pace. Airtable shipped heavily through its AI relaunch. A visible slowdown would say more than any announcement.

FAQ

Has Bending Spoons bought Airtable?

Not yet. It announced a definitive agreement on August 4, 2026, and the transaction is expected to close later in the year subject to regulatory approval.

How much is Bending Spoons paying for Airtable?

An enterprise value of $1.285 billion, or roughly $2.25 billion in equity value once Airtable's net cash is counted.

Will Airtable prices go up?

Nothing has been announced. Bending Spoons has raised prices substantially on products it acquired previously, most visibly Evernote, so it is a reasonable thing to plan around rather than a certainty.

Is my Airtable data safe?

Yes. The service is running normally and the deal has not closed. Taking an export is still worth doing during any ownership change.

The short version

A growing enterprise business sold for a fraction of its peak valuation to an acquirer known for running software profitably rather than growing it. That is interesting, and it is not an emergency. Nothing changes until the deal closes, and probably not immediately after.

The reasonable response is to take a backup, know what your renewal looks like, and understand which job Airtable is really doing for you. If the answer is "tracking our work", you had a cheaper option before this announcement and you still do. If the answer is "modelling our data", stay where you are and watch the pricing.

Written by Lucas

Lucas writes content at Breeze and specializes in project management, team collaboration, and practical workflow advice. He helps small teams and growing businesses plan projects, track progress, and keep work organized by sharing clear, actionable guides.