Basically, widely reported Airtable's 2026 reported ARR was close to $500M. they sold at a ~3x multiple assuming it went flat/down~~. They had raised $1.4B (total latest around 770M) in funding I am not sure for what?? and had ~1B in cash (according to some online sources)??
Now I have no idea what this is even about, maybe all investors wanted out?
It’s strange, I thought they were in pole position to integrate into vibe coded apps with bolt and co. Maybe be a strategy issue?
Perhaps Notion and all the project planning apps like Linear, ClickUp, Asana?
I mean yes but most of them are vibe coding apps now
> Perhaps Notion and all the project planning apps like Linear, ClickUp, Asana?
Most probably, but their market share must have free fall for such valuation
Nobody wants to talk about or reveal the AI or software margins.
Will cause everyone to panic once they see how low the margins are getting year over year.
Assuming M&A deals take at least a few months to close, this acquisition was probably set in motion around April, when SaaS sentiment was near rock bottom and cash-flow machines like Cloudflare, Adobe, and Snowflake were getting crushed simply because Anthropic announced something.
But if the revenues were hit this might be a home run, given AI could replace all of airtable in about a weekend e2e, but then again a competent team of 2-3 devs could have done it over a few weeks, it wasn't ever really about the product quality.
My condolences to all the Airtable users, who are about to get fleeced now, they should consider moving to anything else, even vibe coded slop might be ok.
There's a strong logic to that.
But maybe this is because I do a very basic usage. Uninstalled, though.
I'm a heavy user; I use it to plan 3-week-long trips and another month-long trip every year. It has improved, and they do a ton of user interviews to improve it. So far I've been happy.
I'm not happy they fired the old team, but I put that on the sellers and I don't know what was going on there or the company's finances.
$270M@5.8B Series E 2021 Mar
$185M@2.6B Series D 2020 Sep
$100M@1.1B Series C 2018 Nov
$52M@152M Series B 2018 Mar
29€ a month just to host a meetup page with RSVPs.
I was fine with meetup.com in its original form: it had the community of people wanting to go to events, it let you share your events to these people. People showed up to events.
And the price you pay is for you to access their users. If you think it's just an RSVP page, vibe code one in 5 minutes and try and see how many people will show up to your events.
It's a modern product development failure to think that you must be adding new features all the time. "Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away."
Any other platforms besides Luma you hear about? I know some lean on WhatsApp, some tried to use FB or even LinkedIn events but these are really made for different use cases.
Not all the cool hipster SV tech startups end up being a planetary success, some of them end up in this zombie state.
Bending Spoons must have amazing negotiaters to strike such a bargain.
We should send them to Iran to negotiate the peace deal.
Can't say it'll be hugely missed whatever they do at this point.
'entshittification' in software is pretty much almost a standard.
Software and businesses that goes through these stages:
Venture Capital, Private Equity, Acquisitions, Ads / Sponsors, Raising Prices due to competition, etc.
Always get enshittified.
It's really every category of commercial activity. Restaurants food quality, cable tv channels, movie sequels, home appliances, airline travel, theme parks, etc.
For years, I had a particular local HVAC company do my twice-a-year maintenance on my air conditioner and furnace. I liked the owner and he had a crew of older experienced guys that knew what they were doing. He then sold the business to another owner and he completely changed out the crew to kids that barely look 18 years old. The young inexperienced techs didn't have the skills to diagnose anything on their own. They always had to phone the home office and use their smartphones to send video/photos of what they're looking at to the more knowledgeable technician at the office. That way, the senior guy sitting at the desk can walk them through what to do next. That's when I realized the financial game the new owner was playing: hire new kids that just completed their 3-month HVAC tech certificate for cheap wages but still charge the same high prices that the old owner was charging for experienced techs. And only pay for one expensive senior tech back at the office to be a "shared resource" for all the clueless techs out in the field. That type of "enshittification" didn't require venture capital, or private equity, or ads. The common pattern of degrading a product or service has the same thing in common ... humans.
The vast majority of enshittification is not caused by private equity or ads.
Getting users is hard, especially on the Internet where your audience is global, and competition is fierce. Word of mouth or user advocacy has always been the best cost-to-value marketing tool.
So starting out by offering things for free or at a loss has been the go-to strategy forever.
But (as we all know) that's not sustainable, so there's pretty much nowhere to go but down, from a value-to-user perspective.
- Make offers so low that - if anyone were to accept the deal, they're desperate/greedy enough to take it - hike price and limit features - people who do not have the capacity to switch will bear the cost - bleed out remaining customers
If it works, it works. They're basically betting against the amount of business depth that exists in the world
Yes, all the company execs at Airtable and the VCs and their lawyers and finance guys and advisors are stupid and were incapable of fielding rival offers...
Businesses tend to sell for their market value at that point in time.
You maybe justly concerned for it being an open source project that is backed by one small company that sells hosted plans.
The difference is that Grist is a core part of the French Government’s open source web applications La Suite
I feel like everyone I know/knew who was really into Airtable was pretty sophisticated and used it for complex data wrangling that was beyond the typical tools they had access to.
But they were often solo operators for that data because whatever they were wrangling wasn't worth putting into a database or investing in more robust tools (from a company perspective)..
So perhaps you are correct.
But they have had a distinct lack of imagination for a very long time.
I don't see how Airtable makes money on its own.
They then fire nearly all of the existing new companies staff and think of all the ways they can maximally monetise the existing userbase. Growing the product via investing in it isn't a priority, revenue stream is.
They get a lot of stick, but in fairness they are up front about their business model; they don't hide the fact that they are going to fire most people, unlike traditional private equity firms who make false promises.
Airtable felt stuck for a long before that, now is just the moment to remind ourselves not to be stuck with it.
2026: Airtable
2025: Eventbrite, AOL, Vimeo, Brightcove, Komoot
2024: WeTransfer, Issuu, Hopin, Meetup, Mosaic Group
2023: Evernote
2022: Filmic Pro
2021: Remini
2018: Splice