Airtable was still growing annual recurring revenue over 20% when Bending Spoons announced the acquisition. About $480M in ARR against a $1.285B enterprise value works out to roughly 2.7x. The equity value was about $2.25B after including Airtable’s net cash.
That interests me more than the comparison with Airtable’s $11B valuation in 2021. Plenty of things were expensive in 2021.
BSP buys software people already pay for and changes how it’s run. AI could let the same core team handle more of those acquisitions. I can see the appeal if they can bring costs down without making the products worse.
The Q2 numbers give me some pause. Revenue grew 126% to $704M (mostly from acquisitions). Organic growth was about 3%. They also ended June with $4.09B in net debt (although that was before the IPO proceeds came in).
I’m interested in what happens to Airtable’s growth after BSP changes the pricing and operations. Buying it at that multiple looks promising. But losing a large chunk of customers could throw all that out the window. Right now it sits about 44% below its high. Seems like an opportunity. Anyone else looking into Bending Spoons?