A state filing puts a number on the cuts Airtable’s new Italian owner announced this month, and the buyer’s track record suggests more may follow.
Six weeks after Bending Spoons closed its $1.285 billion purchase of Airtable, the San Francisco software company has told California regulators that it will permanently lay off 190 workers at its headquarters at One Front Street in the Financial District.
The notice, filed under California’s Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act and posted by the Employment Development Department, lists the employer as Formagrid Inc., doing business as Airtable, at One Front Street, 28th floor. It is dated Oct. 15 and gives an effective date of Jan. 15, 2027. The layoff is classified as permanent, according to the state data, which is also compiled by CaliforniaWarn.
The filing is the first hard number attached to a cut that the companies have described only in general terms. On Oct. 12, Airtable’s new leadership said it was “parting ways with a large portion of the pre-acquisition team.” Neither company has said how many people worked at Airtable before the deal, how many remain, or whether more cuts are planned at Airtable offices outside California.
Asked about the filing, Sean Bennett, a spokesman for the Employment Development Department, sent the state’s copy of the notice. “For additional information, please visit our Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) webpage,” he wrote. “Click the link to the Rapid Response Program section for information on EDD services and resources available to employees who have been laid off.”
Airtable and Bending Spoons did not respond to requests for comment sent Monday.
What the buyer said it would do
Bending Spoons, a Milan-based company that listed its shares on the Nasdaq on July 1 under the ticker BSP, announced the deal on Aug. 4. It described an all-cash transaction valuing Airtable at an enterprise value of $1.285 billion, its first acquisition as a public company. Airtable, founded in 2012 and best known for a spreadsheet-like database tool used by marketing teams, product managers and operations staff, said it served more than 500,000 organizations, including 80 percent of the Fortune 100, and had about $480 million in annual recurring revenue, growing more than 20 percent a year.
The deal closed Sept. 4, according to a Bending Spoons announcement also filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. “As we take the reins, our focus will be on sustaining that growth by investing heavily in Airtable’s product, customer support, and go-to-market capabilities,” Luca Ferrari, Bending Spoons’ chief executive, said at the time. Howie Liu, Airtable’s co-founder, said in the company’s own announcement that Bending Spoons “has the resources and long-term perspective” to carry the product forward.
Before the sale closed, Airtable’s newer AI agent business, Hyperagent, was moved into a separate company, Hyperagent Inc., according to Bending Spoons’ filings, so it was not part of what the buyer acquired.
The announcement, and the number
Five weeks after closing, Alessandro Savarese, a Bending Spoons executive who joined Airtable to lead its product team, published a post titled “Back to bases.” He said the new owners had spent several weeks studying the product and were “parting ways with a large portion of the pre-acquisition team, who will be leaving by the end of the week with substantial separation packages.”
“This decision wasn’t taken lightly, and it doesn’t reflect on the team’s excellent work,” he wrote. “At Bending Spoons, we’ve seen firsthand how smaller, faster-moving teams with streamlined responsibilities can have an outsized impact.”
The post said Airtable’s customer-facing organization was not affected and that customers’ plans and prices would not change. It laid out a product agenda built around a core team, a group focused on speed and performance, and work on AI features and permissions, staffed in part by engineers, product managers and designers brought in from Bending Spoons.
Federico Simionato, a Bending Spoons product leader, wrote on X that the cuts reflected the company’s “deep belief that small teams ship more and better,” Business Insider reported. “To everyone leaving: thank you,” he wrote. “If you’re hiring, these are excellent people and worth a call.” A spokesperson told Business Insider the company was “not able to share additional details on the number of individuals impacted.”
The state filing answers part of that question, but only for San Francisco. California’s law requires notice for layoffs of 50 or more workers within 30 days at a covered establishment, so the 190 figure does not necessarily capture remote employees assigned elsewhere or staff in other countries.
A timeline that raises a question
The dates in the filing do not line up neatly with the announcement. Mr. Savarese said departing employees would leave “by the end of the week” of Oct. 12. The WARN notice, dated three days later, puts the effective date three months out, on Jan. 15.
One common way employers reconcile those dates is to keep departing workers on the payroll, without requiring them to work, through the notice period. The companies have not said whether that is what happened here, and the separation terms have not been made public.
The gap has drawn the attention of at least one plaintiffs’ firm. On Oct. 22, Strauss Borrelli PLLC, a Chicago firm that advertises WARN Act cases, said it was “investigating whether Airtable failed to provide at least 60 days’ notice before laying off 190 employees,” and said affected workers “may be entitled to 60 days of severance pay and benefits.” The firm has not filed a lawsuit, and it did not respond to an email from The Inquirer on Monday.
On its face, the filing gives more notice than the law requires: Oct. 15 to Jan. 15 is 92 days, well beyond the 60 days required by both the federal WARN Act and California’s version. Whether the notice was adequate could depend on facts that are not public, including when employees actually stopped being paid and what their separation agreements say.
What the law requires
The federal law, passed in 1988, generally applies to employers with 100 or more workers and requires 60 days’ notice of a plant closing or mass layoff. An employer that violates it can owe back pay and benefits for up to 60 days, though the statute reduces that liability by wages paid during the violation period and by voluntary, unconditional payments not required by any legal obligation.
California’s law is broader. It covers establishments with 75 or more employees and counts any layoff of 50 or more workers within 30 days, regardless of what share of the work force that represents. It also requires notice to the state, to the local workforce development board and to city and county officials. A law that took effect Jan. 1, Senate Bill 617, added requirements: notices must now say whether the employer will coordinate “rapid response” services through the local workforce board, include contact information for that board and point workers to CalFresh food assistance.
The Employment Development Department’s Rapid Response program, which Mr. Bennett pointed to, offers laid-off workers help with unemployment insurance, job searches and retraining.
The Bending Spoons model
For people who follow Bending Spoons, the Airtable cuts were not a surprise. The company has built a business of buying established software and internet brands, rebuilding their products with its own staff and running them with far fewer employees.
After buying Evernote, it laid off 129 people in 2023 and sharply limited the app’s free plan, drawing complaints from longtime users. It laid off the entire staff of the video app Filmic in late 2023. After acquiring WeTransfer in 2024, it planned to cut about 75 percent of the staff, TechCrunch reported. In January, after closing its $1.38 billion purchase of Vimeo, it laid off what it called a “large portion” of the company, The Verge reported; a spokeswoman confirmed the layoffs but declined to give numbers. In April, it did the same at Eventbrite, the San Francisco ticketing company it bought for about $500 million, which had reported 636 employees at the end of 2025.
The company has been unusually direct about the approach. In its registration statement for the Nasdaq listing, as quoted by TechCrunch, Bending Spoons said it had added “1,830 full-time equivalent team members through the acquisitions of AOL, Eventbrite, and Vimeo,” and added: “Once the transformations of the three businesses are substantially complete later in 2026, we expect only a few hundred to remain.”
The same filing presented the results in financial terms. Bending Spoons reported $1.31 billion in revenue for 2025 with roughly 620 of its own core employees, whom it calls “Spooners,” and said revenue per full-time Spooner had risen to $2.57 million in 2025 from $1.12 million in 2023. It says it aims to hold acquired businesses indefinitely and has never sold one. Mr. Ferrari has said artificial intelligence will make the model more scalable: “As AI enables us to accomplish more with fewer people, the scalability of our acquisition and transformation model should improve as well.”
Those figures describe the parent company’s productivity; they do not show whether customers of the acquired products are better or worse served. Matteo Danieli, a Bending Spoons co-founder, has described customer retention after its acquisitions as “remarkably stable.” The company has not published retention figures for individual products.
Airtable’s third major cut
For Airtable, the layoff is the third large reduction in four years. The company cut 254 jobs, about 20 percent of its staff, in December 2022, TechCrunch reported, and 237 more, about 27 percent, in September 2023, according to Forbes. Like many San Francisco software companies, it hired heavily during the pandemic, when its valuation in private markets reached $11 billion in late 2021, far above the price Bending Spoons ultimately paid.
The notice adds Airtable to a growing list of Bay Area employers filing layoff notices this fall; eBay, for one, reported 229 layoffs in San Jose on Oct. 21, according to the state’s records.
What the filing does not say is how large Airtable will be when Bending Spoons is done. The company has told investors that its acquired businesses typically end up with a small fraction of their former head count. Mr. Savarese has promised Airtable’s customers unchanged plans, prices and support. The 190 jobs in the state’s records are the first public count of the people that approach has affected.
Wendell Yamashiro covers business, technology, labor, trade and the Bay Area economy for Trade and Commerce. More from Wendell Yamashiro
