Italy's Bending Spoons is buying America's Airtable for 1.28 billion dollars (around 1.18 billion euros) in cash. This is the Milan firm's first acquisition since it listed last month at an estimated value of 18 billion dollars, and it describes its operating model perfectly.

Airtable was founded in 2013 and has so far raised over 1.4 billion dollars across multiple funding rounds. In 2021, when money was cheap and every spreadsheet tool looked like the next revolution, it was worth more than 11 billion. This year its shares traded on secondary markets at an implied value of 4 billion. The sale price is now 1.28 billion. So the company did not collapse - it simply returned to where it belongs once the enthusiasm evaporated.

And here is the number that makes the story more interesting than an ordinary decline. Airtable has annual recurring revenue of around 480 million dollars, growing at over 20 percent a year, and serves more than 500,000 organisations, including 80 percent of the Fortune 100. This is not a firm without customers. This is a firm that in 2021 was valued far above what the market was later willing to pay.

Luca Ferrari, the founder of Bending Spoons, packages it in a standard corporate sentence: „Airtable is a pioneering brand reshaping the way teams organise data.” What the firm actually does is better known: it buys companies trading below their private valuations, cuts staff, simplifies the products and forces them to run profitably. Evernote, WeTransfer, EventBrite, Vimeo - all went through the same machine.

This is a European firm collecting American software brands at a discount, which is in itself a different story from the one we usually hear about the relationship between Silicon Valley and Europe. The question left for the 500,000 organisations using Airtable is simpler: what exactly gets simplified next, and who notices first?