Italian roll-up Bending Spoons agreed on Aug. 4 to buy San Francisco no-code company Airtable in an all-cash deal at $1.285 billion enterprise value — a steep markdown from the $11 billion valuation it carried at its 2021 peak.

Bending Spoons agreed on Tuesday to acquire Airtable in an all-cash deal that values the San Francisco no-code software company at $1.285 billion, the two companies said. It is the first purchase by the Italian acquirer since its Nasdaq debut in July, and it lands well below the roughly $11 billion valuation Airtable carried at its December 2021 Series F.

Read the structure before the headline number. Bending Spoons said Airtable's net cash implies an equity value of about $2.25 billion — the figure Sifted and others ran with — while Reuters and Euronext priced the deal at $1.285 billion in enterprise value. That spread is the tell: a company that raised more than $1.4 billion over its life is still sitting on a large cash pile, and sold the operating business for a fraction of what the 2021 boom said it was worth. Airtable's performance claims — $480 million in ARR, 500,000-plus organizations, 80% of the Fortune 100 — come from CEO Howie Liu and the company, not a filing. The deal is expected to close by year-end, pending regulatory approval.

This is the Bending Spoons playbook, not a growth story. The company runs a private-equity-style model — buy digital businesses trading below peak, cut costs, streamline the product — and Airtable follows this year's purchases of AOL and Eventbrite, atop an older portfolio that includes Evernote and WeTransfer. Acquirers who buy at this stage typically trim headcount fast; that is the part employees should watch.

What isn't settled: the deal terms haven't surfaced in a filing as of Tuesday, Airtable's revenue figures remain company-provided, and any layoffs would come after close. For Airtable, whose secondaries reportedly traded near $4 billion earlier this year, the IPO story is over. The number that matters now is whatever severance line shows up once the deal closes.