Bending Spoons, the former unicorn that posted 95% revenue growth year over year, agreed Tuesday to buy Airtable in an all-cash deal that values the software company at $1.285 billion, with an equity value of about $2.25 billion once Airtable’s cash balance is factored in. The transaction is the Italian company’s first acquisition since it went public on the Nasdaq in June.

The purchase price is far below Airtable’s previous valuations. The database and spreadsheet company raised more than $1.4 billion in venture funding and was valued at more than $11 billion during the 2021 tech boom, when investors were pricing software companies primarily on growth. Earlier this year, Airtable shares traded on secondary markets at about $4 billion. Tuesday’s deal values the company at less than a quarter of that secondary-market price and about a fifth of its 2021 high.

“We’re looking forward to welcoming Airtable into Bending Spoons. Airtable is a pioneering brand reshaping how teams organize data and manage critical workflows,” Bending Spoons CEO and cofounder Luca Ferrari said in a company release. He also linked the valuation to Airtable’s recent growth, saying: “The value being delivered is reflected in annual recurring revenue growing over 20% [year over year] to approximately $480 million as of June 2026, and joining forces with Bending Spoons will accelerate innovation even further.”

Airtable, founded in 2013, serves more than 500,000 organizations, including 80% of the Fortune 100. Bending Spoons said the deal is expected to close by the end of the year, pending regulatory approval. The acquisition also lands as software buyers and sellers continue adjusting to a market that no longer rewards growth the way it did in 2021, making valuation resets a practical reality for companies that once had much richer private-market prices.

A software valuation bust

Part of the reason Airtable’s price fell so sharply lies in the broader reset in software valuations since 2021. The boom rewarded fast-growing subscription companies with valuations that assumed growth would continue compounding. Since then, many of those companies, Airtable included, have had to demonstrate growth at lower multiples, and secondary markets adjusted well before any buyer arrived.

Bending Spoons cofounder Matteo Danieli told TechCrunch that the company sees the current software valuation environment as favorable for buyers, saying Bending Spoons had largely avoided the reset itself while others deployed capital into it.

That timing is central to Bending Spoons’ strategy. The company has built a portfolio of more than 50 acquisitions by targeting apps it views as well-known but underpriced relative to their user base, then reducing costs and reworking pricing and product design. Airtable fits a pattern that already includes AOL, Eventbrite, Evernote, Vimeo, and WeTransfer, although it differs in one important respect: unlike some earlier targets, Airtable’s revenue was still growing at the time of the sale rather than stalling. For users and enterprise customers, that means the deal is notable not just as another software buyout, but as a test of how an acquisition-focused operator approaches a product with an established customer base and still-expanding revenue.

Going public

The Airtable acquisition is also the first major test of Bending Spoons’ strategy since it became a public company. Its F-1 filing in June offered the public its first detailed look at the finances behind its acquisition model. Revenue rose 95% year over year to $1.31 billion in 2025, more than tripling since 2023, while operating profit more than doubled to $278 million.

That momentum continued into 2026. In the first quarter, revenue more than doubled to $601.3 million, and the company swung to a $27.5 million net profit from a $112.2 million net loss a year earlier. Bending Spoons priced its Nasdaq listing at $29 a share in July, above its marketed range, giving it a valuation of roughly $18.4 billion. Shares closed at $36.22 on Monday.

The Airtable deal comes during what is shaping up to be a busy IPO summer, with SpaceX trading around $1.4 trillion and Anthropic raising at a $965 billion post-money valuation, a wave that has created a new class of ultrawealthy “IPO Bros.” OpenAI is also expected to go public, and the boom has extended well beyond AI names. South Korean chipmaker SK Hynix priced its U.S. depositary receipts at $149 each, raising about $26.5 billion in one of the largest U.S. share sales ever by a foreign issuer.

Against that backdrop, Bending Spoons is a smaller but closely watched public debut, and Tuesday’s deal offers investors an early look at how it plans to deploy the capital it raised.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com