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Bending Spoons agreed to buy Airtable last Tuesday at a $1.285B enterprise value. Social media called it a disaster. Airtable's seed investors made about 28x.
Both are true. Here is what the headlines missed.
The $965M nobody counted
The $1.285B is the price for the operating business. Airtable was sitting on roughly $965M of unspent venture money, which is why the implied equity value is $2.25B. Bending Spoons is buying the company and handing the war chest back to the people who funded it.
Read that again. Nearly half of what shareholders receive is money they already put in.
The carve-out in the filing
Before signing, Airtable moved its Hyperagent business line into a separate entity. Hyperagent Inc. is a named party to the purchase agreement. Bending Spoons gets the database, the workflows, the 500,000 organizations, the 80% of the Fortune 100 and the $480M of recurring revenue. Howie Liu keeps the agents.
Do not overread it. Bending Spoons cited the same $480M ARR after the carve-out was already done, so Hyperagent was contributing roughly nothing to revenue. It launched in February. No public ARR, no customer count. What we know is that it was worth carving out of a billion-dollar deal, which is its own kind of disclosure.
What Liu actually owns of the new entity has not been disclosed. Dealroom reads it as existing investors getting liquidity from the sale plus a call option on Hyperagent. Anyone quoting you a precise split is guessing.
Who actually made money
$1.285B on $480M ARR is 2.7x. But Airtable was only growing at 20% year over year. That sounds brutal until you check the comps. Monday.com and Asana both trade around 2.2x sales at similar growth. Airtable sold in line with its public peers.
The waterfall is where it gets interesting. The preference stack is roughly $1.5B, every series 1x non-participating, the clean terms most deals now carry.
Series C through F got roughly 1x back. XN's $735M went in at $11.7B post in December 2021 and comes out flat after about 4.7 years.
CRV, which led the Series A, returned an estimated 5x to 10x.
Seed investors including Caffeinated Capital and DCVC made roughly 28x, a 34% IRR.
Freestyle will clear 55x, mostly because it sold down at the $11.7B peak in 2021 instead of waiting for this.
Liu, Emmett Nicholas and Andrew Ofstad realized about $150M combined.
A visualization of the above (differences as these are from two different sources):
Employees are the loss. Options granted at the 2021 peak carried strike prices set against $11.7B. At an 81% haircut those expired were worthless.
About the buyer
Bending Spoons share price is up 20%+ since announcing the deal on August 4th. Bending Spoons is designed to acquire companies on the cheap, trim costs and increase prices. This validates the theory that they can continue to find and acquire ever larger companies to keep their growth rate.
The lesson that is actually correct
The easy read is that growth slowed and the multiple collapsed.
Four other things to take from this
Don't raise capital you don't need. Airtable had $965M sitting there at exit. That money bought nothing. Venture capital needs 30% a year to work, and dead cash on the cap table is a tax on everyone below the preference stack.
Different investors take different risk. A 1x non-participating preference makes late-stage money far safer than the headline valuation implies. That is why growth investors can be aggressive on price. When they are investing in a company that works, their risk is on the size of the market and growth. Early stage investors are investing in a concept. The variable of outcomes is different for each. You should change your story to reflect this at each round of raising.
Selling early is a strategy. Freestyle beat every investor who held, and it did it with secondary in 2021. Nobody writes LinkedIn posts about that.
The second idea inside your company may be the real company. Liu built Hyperagent inside Airtable and structured it to survive the sale. This helps the founders who own more of the company with no preference stack, new employees get shares priced cheaply and the early stage investors who moved to common will own a bit of the new entity giving them a free call option. In Canada, Motion spun out of Shoelace and is now crushing it. Sometimes it pays to sell the legacy business and start fresh.
Airtable is not a failure. It raised at the top, kept enough discipline late, and still got marked down 81% by a market moving underneath it. Most of us should be so unsuccessful.
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