Employers
Airtable is letting go of “a large portion of the pre-acquisition team,” the software company said on Oct. 12, about five weeks after Italian software group Bending Spoons completed its purchase of the business. Neither company has said how many people are affected.
The disclosure came in a company blog post titled “Back to bases: What’s next at Airtable,” written by Alessandro Savarese, Airtable’s new product lead. He wrote that the departing employees “will be leaving by the end of the week with substantial separation packages,” and that the decision “doesn’t reflect on the team’s excellent work.”
What changed
Bending Spoons announced on Sept. 4, 2026, that it had completed the acquisition, taking 100% of Airtable’s shares in an all-cash deal, according to the release it filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. The release did not state a price and said more than 500,000 organizations use Airtable.
In the Oct. 12 post, Savarese said Bending Spoons has brought experienced engineers, product managers and designers from its own portfolio into Airtable, and that they are already shipping changes. A small group he called the “Speedy Squad” shipped more than 30 product improvements in the previous three weeks, he wrote, and now sits inside a new Core team. The post said plans, pricing and service offerings are unchanged for customers and that the customer-facing organization was not affected by the cuts.
The AI angle, kept in proportion
The post pairs the staff cuts with a product plan that leans heavily on artificial intelligence. Airtable said it would roll out four capabilities in the coming weeks: an upgraded version of its Omni assistant, a tool called Airtable Canvas for building custom apps, a more capable connection for outside AI tools through MCP, and options for customers to trigger their own AI agents from automations. Longer term, it wants agents to have their own identity, access and accountability inside the platform.
That timing invites the conclusion that AI replaced the departing workers, but neither company has said so. The stated rationale is organizational: a belief that smaller teams, partly staffed from Bending Spoons’ existing portfolio, can build faster. No breakdown of affected roles, functions or locations has been published.
Why it matters for job seekers
For software workers, the episode shows how quickly headcount can change after an acquisition. Here the cuts came roughly five weeks after the deal closed, with departures effective within the same week. Workers at companies being acquired have reason to ask early about severance terms and which teams the buyer plans to staff with its own people.
For hiring managers, the cuts mean experienced product, engineering and design talent from a widely used work-management platform may be entering the market. How many people that represents remains unknown.
The catch
The size of the reduction is the key missing fact. “A large portion” is Airtable’s own description, and no headcount, percentage or location data has been released by Airtable, Bending Spoons or a government notice reviewed for this report. Reported purchase prices for the deal also vary across outlets, and the completion release did not state one, so this report does not use a figure.
Sources
- Airtable, “Back to bases: What’s next at Airtable,” October 12, 2026. https://www.airtable.com/newsroom/back-to-bases
- Bending Spoons (Form 6-K, Exhibit 99.1), “Bending Spoons completes the acquisition of Airtable,” September 4, 2026. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/0002004711/000200471126000013/bsp_ex99-1.htm
Featured photo: A closed laptop beside an empty chair at a desk at Aliprandi Arredi in Brescia, Italy, Feb. 13, 2017. Representative image; not an Airtable office. Photo: Luca Bravo, via Wikimedia Commons (CC0). Cropped from the original.
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