Airtable is now Bending Spoons

Happy Tuesday Brex Community,

Bending Spoons is an Italian tech company based in Milan, founded back in 2013. Their whole thing is buying up established apps and digital products that already have a solid user base, then rebuilding them from the inside: new tech, new UX, sharper monetization, the works. They're not flipping these companies either, they hold onto everything they buy and run it for the long haul. The company went public on Nasdaq on July 1, 2026 under the ticker BSP, and the stock popped about 40 percent on its first day of trading.

As of right now the stock is sitting around $36 a share, which puts the market cap at roughly $23 billion.

Their portfolio is a whos-who of apps you've probably used at some point. The core lineup includes AOL, Brightcove, Eventbrite, Evernote, Harvest, komoot, Remini, StreamYard, Vimeo, and WeTransfer. Beyond those they've also picked up Meetup, Issuu, FiLMiC, MileIQ, the pet tracking company Tractive, and a batch of app assets from Mosaic Group. They also built Italy's Immuni contact tracing app back during the pandemic, though that one wasn't an acquisition.

And now the big news this morning, Bending Spoons announced a deal to buy Airtable. It's an all cash transaction valuing Airtable at $1.285 billion in enterprise value, which works out to about $2.25 billion once you factor in Airtable's cash on hand. This is Bending Spoons' first acquisition since going public, and it's a meaningful one, Airtable brings in roughly $480 million in annual recurring revenue, growing more than 20 percent year over year, with over 500,000 organizations using it including 80 percent of the Fortune 100. The deal still needs regulatory sign off and isn't expected to close until later this year, but both companies say they'll keep operating independently until then.

Airtable last raised equity in Dec 2021, it was a $735M round at a $11.7B valuation. The private market is still digesting the frothy times of ZIRP, no doubt that Bending Spoons will be picking up other VC backed companies who raised a lot of money in this era.

I do wonder what valuation the Airtable investors were carrying this investment at before the Bending Spoons acquisition and how that was reflected in TVPI reported to their LPs, was it marked down appropriately? If you have insights there, do let me know, you can respond to this email as it goes directly to me.

Have a great week!

Shai Goldman

Meticulous AI

The problem: AI has made writing code fast and cheap, but that just shifts the bottleneck downstream. Code review and the feedback loop become the bottleneck once code generation is relatively inexpensive. Teams can't actually ship at AI speed unless they have testing that gives full confidence, and traditional testing approaches, written and maintained by hand, can't scale to cover the millions of lines of code and edge cases in a modern codebase.

The solution: Meticulous automatically generates and maintains a massive suite of end-to-end UI tests with no developer effort. It automatically generates and maintains thousands of flows to cover every edge case across the millions of lines of code in customer codebases, detecting even a single pixel difference in the video streams of those flows before any change ships. Beyond just flagging failures, it gives visibility into the full impact of a change so engineers, PMs, designers, and now AI agents can preview that impact before merging, and agents can iterate on their own changes prior to human review.

Why now: The AI coding wave has inverted the old constraint. Code is cheap to produce, so the real limiter is whether you can verify it fast enough to keep up. That's why Meticulous frames exhaustive, zero-effort testing as the unlock for shipping at "AI speed," and it's landed with engineering orgs at Notion, Dropbox, Wiz, ElevenLabs, LaunchDarkly, and others, with the company using its new $15M raise to push testing coverage closer to true exhaustiveness and give customers another step change in velocity.

Events you might see us at - subscribe here - all focused on Founders, VCs & Finance leaders:

Aug 5 - NYC - Brex Yacht Club - open to recently VC funded startup founders - at capacity

Aug 6 - NYC - free ice cream , pull up! - Apply Here

Aug 18 - Chicago - Brex Mode - for finance leaders - Apply Here

Aug 25 - Austin - Brex Mode - for finance leaders - Apply Here

Sept 8 - NYC - startup party on a boat - for startup founders who recently raised - contact me to get an invite

Sign up here for Brex and receive $1,250 towards Brex Travel or $750 cash

Brex is the intelligent finance platform built for speed and control. Combining corporate cards, banking, treasury, expense management, bill pay, travel, and accounting, Brex helps companies spend smarter and move faster in 120 countries. By integrating AI across every workflow, Brex enables founders and finance teams to eliminate manual work, do more with less, and accelerate impact. More than 35,000 companies from startups to enterprises run on Brex, including Anthropic, OpenAI, Cursor, Granola, ServiceTitan, Robinhood, DoorDash, etc.