Founders are ditching their startups

Howie Liu sold his company—but not before taking the best part of it back. Days before Airtable's acquisition by Bending Spoons was signed, its "Hyperagent" unit, the agent-building platform and the one line of business its co-founder and chief executive still believed in, had been carved out into a separate entity, Hyperagent Inc., which he intends to keep and run himself. What the Milan-based acquirer of unfashionable software, freshly listed on Nasdaq, actually agreed to buy was Airtable minus its future: the database, the 500,000 customer organizations and the roughly $480m in annual recurring revenue.

On its face the transaction is a humbling with a cushion. Airtable raised at an $11.7 billion valuation in December 2021; its enterprise value on sale is $1.285 billion, a shade under three times revenue. Because the company had spent little of the roughly $965m raised in its final rounds, most of that cash returns to shareholders, lifting the implied equity value to about $2.25 billion and leaving the preferred stack close to whole: XN, a hedge fund, and the crossover investors Thrive Capital and Greenoaks Capital led those last rounds and should recover most of what they put in. The employees and common holders, whose equity sits beneath that stack, feel the fall. For those who wrote the largest checks the result is neither triumph nor catastrophe; it is the orderly wind-down the venture industry has spent three years wishing on its overvalued book.

For two years the defining exit of the AI boom has been the reverse-acquihire, in which a large company hires a startup's founders and licenses its technology without buying the firm, leaving the shell to its remaining staff. Microsoft did it to Inflection, Amazon to Adept, Google to Character.AI and, last summer, to Windsurf; Meta arranged a version of it with Scale AI. The four largest technology firms spent north of $20 billion on such deals between 2024 and 2026. In each, the initiative lay with the buyer. Airtable is the moment the founder took it himself, dividing his own company, selling the half with a past and keeping the half with a future.