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The Pulse: Bending Spoons' Acquisition Strategy
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- DeepHorus
Bending Spoons announced this week that it would acquire Airtable for $1.285 billion in cash. The price is below the $1.4 billion Airtable has raised and well under its $11 billion valuation at its December 2021 fundraise. The transaction reflects Bending Spoons’ pattern of buying established software products and taking over operations.
Airtable’s sale is being presented as a pragmatic exit for a company seeking the strongest available cash return. Bending Spoons moves technical work to its in-house engineers in Italy and Europe and often dismisses most or all of an acquired company’s original team. Cost and operating efficiency are central to that model.
Evernote illustrates the strategy. According to a podcast discussion with Bending Spoons engineers, the note service was still running a Java 11 monolith in 2023, with user data spread across 750 manually provisioned Google Cloud virtual machines. The setup required frequent intervention, suffered overloaded machines, delivered poor performance, and made on-call work difficult.
After the takeover, engineers moved Evernote’s data to a managed database and split the monolith into microservices. They completed the migration without disrupting users, substantially improved backend performance, and reduced the on-call burden. The overhaul took about six months.
The model carries two prominent criticisms: price increases and layoffs. Evernote’s Pro plan reportedly rose from $37 a year before 2023 to $250 by 2026, even as Bending Spoons added features including AI tools. Supporters may accept higher fees for better service and investment, while critics say the company prioritizes revenue over customer retention.
For Airtable, the key issue is whether Bending Spoons can reproduce those technical gains without disrupting users. Staff consolidation could lower costs, but price increases could push customers toward rivals, and an engineering handover could create uncertainty. The result will depend on reliability, feature development, retention, and whether cost savings prove durable.
