SaaS Shudders After Airtable's Humbling Sale to Italian Grim Reaper Bending Spoons - Newcomer

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    "domain": "airtable.com"
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  "data": {
    "url": "https://www.newcomer.co/p/saas-shudders-after-airtables-humbling",
    "title": "SaaS Shudders After Airtable's Humbling Sale to Italian Grim Reaper Bending Spoons - Newcomer | Substack",
    "excerpt": "Bending Spoons agrees to acquire Airtable at a steep discount to its ZIRP-era valuation, but early-stage investors make out well. Jeff Dean leaves Google DeepMind and Demis Hassabis steps back amid an overhaul of Google’s AI teams. Fresh TVPI data from Carta shows how wide the gap is between a good and great outcome in venture. Hardware companies from nuclear reactors to automated manufacturing raise billion-dollar rounds. Two profiles on Sequoia dig into the inner workings of the firm under new stewards Alfred Lin and Pat Grady . Earnings calls spook the markets on SpaceX but give Palantir a big boost. Jasmine Sun travels to the Midwest to discover why Americans hate data centers so much. Nikita Bier steps down as X’s head of product. Airtable’s definitive agreement on Tuesday to sell to European roll-up juggernaut Bending Spoons at an enterprise value of $1.285 billion could be just a taste of the disappointing exits in store for pre-AI software-as-a-service companies. Airtable, founded in 2013, had around $480 million in ARR and was growing more than 20% year-over-year at the time of the deal. That still wasn't enough in an era of supercharged AI growth and worries that agentic coding will kill software companies. Even counting the roughly $965 million in cash, that brings the deal's equity value to $2.25 billion, it's a steep discount to Airtable's pandemic-era $11.7...",
    "summary": "Airtable spun out its AI agent platform, Hyperagent, ahead of its acquisition by Bending Spoons.",
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    "image_url": "https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!a4m0!,w_1200,h_675,c_fill,f_jpg,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep,g_auto/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F04771202-9158-4635-aaa0-813ed273c2a4_4460x2973.jpeg",
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    "published_at": "2026-08-07T16:06:40Z",
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    "related_company_name": "Hyperagent",
    "related_company_domain": "hyperagent.com"
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