The Bending Spoons acquisition of Airtable, what the public record shows about the acquirer, and why Notion's 2026 releases make this the right moment to move.
On 4 August 2026, Airtable customers received were told: Bending Spoons has agreed to acquire Airtable for $1.285 billion in an all-cash deal, the Milan-based company's first acquisition since its Nasdaq listing in July.
So.. Let’s unpack that.
The Deal
The numbers first, because they tell their own story. Bending Spoons is paying an enterprise value of $1.285 billion, which the company says implies an equity value of roughly $2.25 billion once Airtable's cash balance is counted. Reuters reports the deal is all cash and awaits regulatory approval, with completion expected before the end of the year.
For context, TechCrunch notes that Airtable raised more than $1.4 billion across its funding rounds and was valued at over $11 billion at its 2021 peak. The same report puts annual recurring revenue at roughly $480 million as of June 2026, growing over 20% year on year, and CEO Howie Liu has said the platform serves more than 500,000 organisations, including 80% of the Fortune 100. A healthy, growing business, in other words, selling for around a fifth of its peak valuation. The price is the first thing worth noticing.
What the Bending Spoons means for Airtable
I can’t predict the future for Airtable and won’t try to. What we can do together, is look at what journalists and users have documented about Bending Spoons' previous purchases, and let draw our own conclusions.
TechCrunch's profile of Bending Spoons records that after acquiring Evernote, the company laid off 129 staff and later restricted free users to 50 notes. The same profile notes that Filmic's entire team was laid off following its acquisition.
PetaPixel reported in January 2026 that almost all of Vimeo's staff were let go after that acquisition, and that 75% of WeTransfer's team was cut within two months of its 2024 purchase.
Cafétech describes the pattern as deliberate strategy: sweeping job cuts after each deal, operations consolidated in Milan, free tiers limited and subscription prices raised. It also notes that CEO Luca Ferrari openly defends the approach, arguing the once-struggling apps now turn a profit.
Engineering commentator Gergely Orosz called the layoffs "the single biggest criticism" of Bending Spoons, while acknowledging the commercial results the model produces.
For its part, Bending Spoons is saying encouraging things. Ferrari's statement on the deal calls Airtable "a pioneering brand reshaping how teams organize data" and promises the acquisition "will accelerate innovation even further." Airtable is also a larger and healthier business than most of the company's previous purchases, so history may not repeat here.
Still, if your organisation runs critical workflows on a platform, you are entitled to read the acquirer's track record before deciding how much to leave riding on it. You do not need to predict the future to plan for it.
Meanwhile, Notion has been shipping
The relevant question for anyone weighing a migration is what they would be moving to, and on that front the past year of Notion releases reads like a roadmap pointed directly at Airtable's territory.
Notion 3.0 rebuilt Notion AI as Agents: AI that can build databases, run multi-step workflows and hold memory, doing anything in the workspace a person can do.
Notion 3.2 brought AI meeting notes to mobile, a choice of AI models, and a people directory.
Notion 3.4 added dashboards that pull charts and KPIs into a single view, alongside a redesigned sidebar and a presentation mode.
Notion 3.5 introduced Workers, a hosted runtime for custom code that powers webhook triggers and database sync without you running your own servers. [This is huge, and will likely mean you can connect any of your services with an API].
Notion 3.6 added support for external agents and vibe-coded HTML blocks.
Upcoming: The things i’m being allowed to test behind closed doors, show Notion is not slowing down either.
The Workers release matters most for Airtable users specifically. Airtable's pitch was always a database that behaves like an app platform, and Workers close that gap from the Notion side: relational databases with granular permissions, plus deployed custom code filling whatever space remains between your tools. Brian Emerick, a Technical Program Manager at Vercel, describes it as Notion becoming "the connective layer" between systems.
The direction of travel matters as much as any single feature. This is an independent, growing company releasing substantial upgrades roughly every other month, with a public record of where it is heading.
Why now, specifically
There is a version of the decision to migrate from Airtable that is made calmly: on your own schedule, with time to audit what you actually use and rebuild it properly. Then there is the hurried response to a pricing change or a feature removal, with your team already frustrated.
The documented history above suggests the second version tends to arrive without much warning: Evernote's free tier restrictions and WeTransfer's transfer limits both followed their acquisitions within roughly a year. Moving early means moving well.
It is also an opportunity dressed as a chore. Most Airtable estates we see have grown by accretion, bases duplicated for one project and never retired, automations nobody remembers building. A migration forces the audit you have been postponing, and rebuilding in Notion means the workflows land inside the same workspace as your documents, meetings and knowledge base, rather than in a silo the rest of the company never opens. The move is a redesign, and redesigns are where the compounding gains live.
How to move without breaking things
The mechanics are more manageable than they look. A CSV export carries most field types across cleanly; linked records need rebuilding as Notion relations, which is the one step worth planning properly rather than improvising. Start with an audit of which bases are genuinely live, migrate those first, and archive the rest where you can still reach them.
Thread & Stack runs exactly these migrations, from the initial audit through to rebuilt relations, permissions and the AI layer on top. If your team is sitting on an Airtable estate and wondering what this acquisition means for you, get in touch and we will map the move together: a diagnostic session first, a clear plan with timings before anything gets touched.