Technology holding company Bending Spoons S.p.A. todayannouncedplans to acquire Airtable Inc., the developer of a popular cloud-based spreadsheet platform.
The all-cash deal is worth $1.285 billion. That’s less than the approximately $1.4 billion Airtable has raised from its investors. The company was valued at $11.7 billion following its most recent funding round, a $735 million Series F deal that closed in 2021.
Italy-based Bending Spoons acquires tech firms and improves their financial performance by enhancing their products. The company has added more than 30 features to Vimeo, a popular video hosting platform, since buying it last November. Bending Spoons has made over 200 improvements to Evernote, a note-taking app it acquired two years earlier.
The company went public on the Nasdaq last month in a listing that raised $1.68 billion. The Airtable acquisition is its first deal since the offering.
Airtable’s namesake platform enables workers to organize to-do items, leads and other business data in spreadsheets. Customers can speed up routine tasks by creating automation workflows. For example, a software team could create a workflow that notifies an executive whenever an important to-do item is completed.
Airtable can also automate more complex tasks. Built-in artificial intelligence agents enable users to enrich spreadsheet data with information from the web, find patterns of interest and generate visualizations. Administrators can customize details such as the thirdparty large language model that the agents use.
Airtable doubles as an application development platform. A tool called Omni enables workers to create simple programs that ease routine business tasks. It can be used together with a second tool, Portals, to build apps for external users such as suppliers. The latter capability makes it possible to implement user-facing forms and login menus.
Airtable applications are connected to spreadsheets that users keep in the platform. By default, those spreadsheets can hold only a limited amount of data. A feature called HyperDB increases the storage limit by connecting the platform to external data repositories such as Snowflake environments. The feature supports spreadsheets with up to 100 million rows.
According to Airtable, its platform is used by more than 500,000 organizations including most of the Fortune 100. The software maker’s annual recurring revenue grew more than 20% in the past year to $480 million. Bending Spoons generated $601.3 million in total sales during its fiscal first quarter.
“We’re committed to investing in Airtable for the long run, and doubling down on its core strength: bringing teams and workflows together in one flexible workspace,” said Bending Spoons co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Luca Ferrari. “We plan to expand what can be done across the full spectrum of work and make Airtable even more valuable to customers at every scale.”
Bending Spoon expects to close the acquisition by year’s end.
Image:Airtable
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