The newly public Italian tech conglomerate Bending Spoons has scooped up another company, database startup Airtable, for $1.28 billion in cash at an equity value of $2.25 billion. It’s a roughly 80% discount for the Thrive- and Coatue-backed company that was valued at $11.7 billion in 2021.
The acquisition underscores calamitous exit prospects for a cohort of SaaS companies that were once pitched as tomorrow’s tech giants.
“Airtable is a negative for private-market marks and positive for liquidity,” said PitchBook senior analyst Derek Hernandez, who has written about AI’s effect on SaaS businesses. “The exit market has been stalled for the last few years, driven by the chasm between 2021 valuations and the cash flows a new buyer could underwrite. A reset of roughly 80% represents at least one instance of the gap closing.”
Airtable raised a $735 million Series F in 2021 at an $11.7 billion valuation led by XN with participation from Silver Lake, Salesforce Ventures, Benchmark and others. The startup raised $1.36 billion in total from private investors, according to PitchBook data.
Other SaaS companies that last raised in 2021 and 2022 haven’t fared much better in their exit prospects. Tegus, a fintech research and corporate intelligence platform startup, was valued at $3.3 billion in 2021 before being acquired by AlphaSense for $930 million in June 2024, a roughly 72% discount off its previous valuation.
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Companies in Airtable’s cohort—SaaS startups that last raised during the VC high times of 2021 and 2022—face bleak prospects given the pressure that AI has put on software valuations.
Talkdesk, a startup developing contact-center management software, last raised a $230 million Series D in August 2021, which tripled its valuation from $3 billion to $10 billion. Miro, a collaborative workspace software startup, raised $400 million in Series C funding in January 2022. Its valuation was $17.5 billion.
Many of these startups have rebranded their offerings as AI. But Airtable, whose CEO claims to be building “the AI-native platform of the future,” demonstrates that commanding top dollar is more than just a marketing exercise.
This article originally appeared on PitchBook News
