Bending Spoons just bought Airtable for $2.25B.

Bending Spoons just bought Airtable for $2.25B. The math behind it says a lot more 👀 The actual deal was $1.285B enterprise value at 2.7x ARR. Two years ago that multiple would’ve been 10x. Here’s what’s actually going on 👇 Bending Spoons acquires Airtable Bending Spoons strikes $2.25bn Airtable deal in first acquisition since IPO Founded in 2013, Airtable has so far raised more than $1.4 billion over multiple funding rounds. At its peak, during the boom days of 2021, it was valued at over $11 billion, but earlier this year, its shares were said to be trading on the secondary markets at a valuation of $4 billion. Bending Spoons, the Italian app acquirer behind AOL, Evernote, Vimeo, and WeTransfer, files for a U.S. IPO Then back in July they IPO'd for $18.4 billion. And this is their first acquisition since going public. The whole playbook is find a brand that slipped out of the spotlight, but still has real loyal users. Buy it, strip out the bloat and overhead, aka they fire a bunch of people and make sure it's profitable. They're buyers, not builders. Now here's the part that if you're in tech, Airtable is not some dying company. They're running up $480 million in ARR, growing 20% year on year. On top of that, they have over 500,000 organizations using them and 80% of Fortune 100s are also clients. So here's the actual maths for this specific deal. That $2.25 billion headline number is the equity value, including cash. The real price, the enterprise value is $1.285 billion, which would give us a 2.7 multiple on ARR. This sets SaaS valuation at ~2.7x EV/ARR at 20%+ growth. Assuming ~30% margin, that's ~8x EV/EBITDA multiple. This excludes HyperAgent spun out. This is significantly lower than 8-10x EV/Revenue valuation back in early 2010s Oracle vs Salesforce period and way worse than 20x EV/Revenue during COVID. So why is a healthy growing company worth only 2.7 times revenue? A couple of years ago that same business would have been worth 10 times that easily. Here's the shift. The moat used to be the software itself. Building the actual tool itself was the hard part. Now AI can spin out a decent version of that tool in an afternoon. So the tool isn't the moat anymore. And once the moat's gone, the valuation has to come down with it, no matter how good your revenue numbers look. And this isn't an Airtable problem. 2.7x is quickly becoming the new benchmark price for solid SaaS businesses. And there are a whole wave of companies sitting at the 2021 era valuations that are about to get repriced the same exact way. So what we learn here is this isn't a one-off. SaaS multiples compress all year. I think this is the new floor. Curious on who's next on Bending Spoons' list? Make sure to follow.