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Today Boom unveils our first completed supersonic turbine core, a 2GW Superfactory, and—one more thing—the world's most advanced all-digital foundry to cast single crystal turbine blades and vanes x.com/i/article/2113…View quoted post on X
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Airtable’s Sale to Bending Spoons Wasn’t a Dream Venture Exit. Still, Timing Can Be Everything.
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 billion valuation.
Still, smart investors find a way to make money.
Venture can be a timing game. While Airtable’s exit may not play as well into the lifetime-partner narrative many VCs push, strategically planned cash-outs made some VCs quite a pretty penny even though the ultimate outcome was underwhelming.
@freestylevc GP Dave Samuel (@dsamuel) is one investor in Airtable who cashed out at the right time.
Samuel wrote Freestyle’s first check into Airtable’s first funding round in March of 2013 for about 10% ownership at a less-than-$10 million valuation before other investors came in, we heard. Freestyle followed on through the Series B round.
The two teams’ relationship went back years before: Samuel had met Airtable CEO Howie Liu when Liu was still a senior at Duke University, and Liu served as Freestyle’s first intern right after the fund’s launch. Liu’s first post-college job was at a Freestyle portfolio company.
As a general house rule, Freestyle sells some shares of its portfolio companies once they hit a unicorn valuation. Freestyle exited a significant amount of its position in 2021 at Airtable’s peak valuation of $11.7 billion. While the exact share count couldn’t be learned, Freestyle’s multiple on invested capital will be more than 55x, we heard (The Wall Street Journal previously reported on Freestyle’s multiple).
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