The Idea

In 2012, Howie Liu was 23 and sitting inside Salesforce, watching the machine from the engine room. He'd co-founded a CRM startup called Etacts at 20 and sold it to Salesforce at 21, which bought him a job leading their social CRM product and a front-row seat to something that bothered him. Enterprises were paying millions for rigid software to do jobs their teams were already bodging together in spreadsheets. Spreadsheets were accessible but dumb. Real databases were powerful but needed engineers. Nobody had built the middle.

He quit and rang Andrew Ofstad, a Google product manager who'd worked on the Maps redesign, then brought in engineer Emmett Nicholas. The three of them started hauling oversized monitors between each other's flats in San Francisco, arguing about Node.js architecture and how fast a window should pop open. Liu read a Japanese design book about white space and disappeared into colour theory for months. They built for nearly three years before letting anyone see it.

This was the beginning of Airtable.

The Execution

• February 2015: After two and a half years in stealth, Airtable came out of hiding with $3 million from Caffeinated Capital, Freestyle Capital, Data Collective and CrunchFund. A further $7.6 million followed in June, with Ashton Kutcher joining CRV on the round.
• 2018: The bottom-up land grab worked. A $52 million Series B in March launched Blocks, and by November a $100 million Series C made it a unicorn at $1.1 billion. Teams inside big companies were adopting it before IT ever signed off.
• September 2020 to March 2021: $185 million at $2.5 billion, then six months later Greenoaks approached Liu unsolicited and put in $270 million at $5.77 billion. The valuation more than doubled in half a year.
• December 2021: The peak. A $735 million Series F at $11 billion, with Salesforce and Michael Dell on the cap table. Total raised: $1.4 billion.
• December 2022: The correction arrived. Airtable cut 254 people, a fifth of the company, and three executives walked out the door in the same week.
• September 2023: Liu cut another 237 staff and publicly blamed himself for the overhiring. Nearly 500 people gone in nine months. The business itself kept compounding: ARR hit $375 million that year on 50% growth, then roughly $478 million in 2024 with the company cash flow positive.
• June 2025: Liu published a letter calling it a refounding, rebuilding Airtable as an AI-native platform with conversational interfaces replacing the grid as the front door.
• October 2025: Airtable acquired DeepSky, an agent startup that had raised $40 million, and hired David Azose, previously engineering lead for ChatGPT's business products, as CTO.
• January 2026: Superagent shipped, the first standalone product in Airtable's 13-year history. By then shares were trading on secondaries at around $4 billion, a $7.7 billion paper writedown. Liu's response: the company still held half of its $1.4 billion in the bank, was throwing off cash, served 500,000 organisations including 80% of the Fortune 100, and he was recruiting on the pitch that the equity was now attractively priced.
• April 2026: Airtable opened Hyperagent to the public, a virtual-machine-based platform running hours-long autonomous workflows across enterprise data. Two new product lines in 15 months, funded entirely from the balance sheet, with no new round raised.
• 4 August 2026: Bending Spoons agreed to buy Airtable for an enterprise value of $1.285 billion, all cash, which the company said implies an equity value of roughly $2.25 billion once Airtable's net cash is counted. ARR was about $480 million as of June, up over 20% year on year. It is the Italian acquirer's first deal since its Nasdaq listing on 1 July, after Evernote, WeTransfer, Vimeo, Eventbrite and AOL. The deal is expected to close by the end of the year.

The lesson?

Do the subtraction. Bending Spoons paid $1.285 billion for the business, but shareholders get $2.25 billion, because nearly a billion of it was already sitting in Airtable's own bank account. That gap is what four years of discipline bought: not a recovered valuation, but a floor under the exit. Liu's $11.7 billion was a story other people told in 2021. The cash was the only part of it nobody could reprice.