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The Pulse: Bending Spoons' Acquisition Strategy
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- DeepHorus
Bending Spoons, the Italian app company known for aggressive turnaround strategies, has acquired Airtable for $1.285 billion in cash, marking its latest high-profile purchase in the software industry. The deal signals the European firm's continued push to absorb well-known digital products and restructure them for profitability. Airtable, a popular database and collaboration platform, becomes the newest addition to a portfolio that already includes Evernote and other legacy applications.
Airtable's sale price represents a significant decline from its earlier valuation. The company had raised $1.4 billion in total funding throughout its history, and its most recent fundraise in December 2021 valued the startup at approximately $11 billion. The $1.285 billion acquisition price therefore falls well below both the total capital raised and the peak valuation, underscoring how far the company's worth has contracted. Selling to Bending Spoons is widely seen as an acknowledgment that the original team could not or would not turn the business around on its own.
Bending Spoons has developed a distinctive playbook: it pays the highest possible cash price for struggling companies with strong brand recognition, then takes over operations with a fraction of the original workforce. The company typically lets go of most or all of the existing staff and moves product operations to its in-house engineering team based in Italy and Europe. This model prioritizes efficiency and profitability over customer volume.
The strategy's effectiveness was demonstrated after Bending Spoons acquired Evernote. Upon taking over, engineers discovered the note-taking service was running as a Java 11 monolith with user data sharded across 750 manually provisioned virtual machines on Google Cloud as recently as 2023. The setup was operationally heavy, unreliable, and required constant manual intervention. Bending Spoons' team migrated the data to a managed database, split the monolith into microservices, and improved backend performance, all within about six months without disrupting user experience.
However, the acquisition model has drawn two major criticisms: price increases and layoffs. After the Evernote takeover, customers paying $37 per year for the Pro plan faced charges of $250 per year by 2026. Meanwhile, most of the original U.S. engineering team was dismissed as operations moved in-house. Critics argue Bending Spoons optimizes for revenue maximization rather than customer base growth.
Looking ahead, the Airtable acquisition will test whether this strategy can scale successfully to a larger, more complex platform. Bending Spoons has shown it can modernize legacy infrastructure efficiently, but the challenge of retaining users while raising prices remains significant. The outcome could shape how other tech acquirers approach turnaround deals in an increasingly competitive software market.
