Airtable spun out Hyperagent before Bending Spoons' $1.285 billion acquisition

Why it matters

The deal prices Airtable's operating business at roughly 2.7 times company-stated ARR and leaves Hyperagent outside Bending Spoons' acquisition perimeter.

Airtable transferred its Hyperagent business into a separate Delaware corporation before Bending Spoons signed an agreement on August 4th to acquire Airtable's core business for an enterprise value of $1.285 billion, according to a regulatory filing.

Howie Liu (@howietl), Airtable's co-founder and CEO, is going all in on the newly independent Hyperagent, investor Paul Klein IV (@pk_iv) said on X on August 5th. The separation leaves Liu with an agent platform he introduced inside Airtable less than six months ago, while Bending Spoons takes control of the database and app-building business he spent more than a decade building.

The transaction has been signed and has not closed. Bending Spoons expects the acquisition to close later in 2026, subject to regulatory approvals and other conditions. The agreement can be terminated if the transaction remains incomplete on February 4th, 2027, although that deadline can be extended under specified circumstances.

Hyperagent sits outside the sale

The SEC filing provides the clearest account of the separation. Before signing the purchase agreement, Airtable's owner reorganized the business and transferred the assets and liabilities associated with Hyperagent to Hyperagent Inc., a newly identified Delaware corporation. Hyperagent Inc. is also a party to the purchase agreement, while Bending Spoons is buying all outstanding shares of Formagrid Inc., which does business as Airtable.

That structure keeps Hyperagent outside the announced acquisition perimeter. The filing does not establish Hyperagent Inc.'s capitalization or identify its shareholders, but Klein's account places Liu at the center of the independent business.

Liu introduced Hyperagent on February 19th as a product from Airtable's team. He argued that improved models had made long-running autonomous work possible and that the remaining opportunity was building the orchestration, tools, memory and computing environment around those models.

Hyperagent gives agents access to isolated computing environments, browsers and command-line shells. Its website says users can connect agents to workplace tools, deploy them through Slack or Telegram and inspect their searches, decisions and generated work. The product targets a different layer of the software market than Airtable's structured databases and no-code applications, even though Liu initially presented the two as part of the same AI push.

Liu is already a two-time founder. He sold CRM startup Etacts to Salesforce at age 21, worked at Salesforce for a year and then began developing Airtable, according to an AWS founder profile. Airtable launched publicly in 2015 after several years of product development.

The price resets Airtable's venture-era valuation

Bending Spoons will pay an enterprise value of $1.285 billion for Airtable. Airtable's net cash and cash equivalents lift the transaction's implied equity value to approximately $2.25 billion, according to the filing. That means roughly $965 million of the equity value comes from cash already on Airtable's balance sheet rather than the price assigned to its operations.

Bending Spoons says Airtable's annual recurring revenue reached approximately $480 million in June 2026, up more than 20% from a year earlier. Using that company-supplied figure, the enterprise value equals roughly 2.7 times ARR.

The price is a steep reset from Airtable's last primary financing. On December 13th, 2021, Airtable raised $735 million in a Series F led by XN at an $11 billion pre-money valuation. Franklin Templeton, J.P. Morgan Growth Equity Partners, MSD Capital, Salesforce Ventures, Silver Lake and funds advised by T. Rowe Price also participated. The round brought Airtable's total funding to $1.36 billion and implied a post-money valuation of about $11.74 billion.

The acquisition's $2.25 billion implied equity value is approximately 81% below that post-money mark. The comparison also shows why the enterprise value matters: Bending Spoons is assigning Airtable's operating business a value below the total capital Airtable raised, while Airtable's remaining cash increases the amount attributable to its equity.

Bending Spoons says Airtable serves more than 500,000 organizations, including 80% of the Fortune 100. The acquisition will be Bending Spoons' first since its July 1st Nasdaq listing. Its portfolio includes AOL, Eventbrite, Evernote, Vimeo and WeTransfer.

Bending Spoons describes its acquisition model as a combination of team reorganizations, technology overhauls, faster product development and changes to marketing and monetization. Hyperagent was removed from Airtable before that process could begin, preserving Liu's newest product as an independent bet on autonomous agents rather than an asset inside the SaaS acquisition.