Bending Spoons Keeps 16 to 29%. Source Airtable's Leavers Before Miro

Somewhere between 530 and 800 Airtable employees are likely on the market right now, and nobody has published how many there are or which teams they came from. If you're hiring engineers, that's the list you want, and the same cut is coming at Miro.

Bending Spoons closed its Airtable deal on Sept 4. On Monday, Oct 12, Airtable product lead Alessandro Savarese announced that affected employees would leave by the end of the week. Nobody gave a headcount. Bending Spoons has published enough of its own numbers, though, that you can estimate the size of the pool, work out which teams it came from, and get ready for the same thing at Miro.

How many people did Airtable actually cut?

My estimate is about 530 to 800 people, out of a pre-deal base of 800 to 935. I got that range by applying Bending Spoons' own retention from past deals (16 to 29%) to Airtable's headcount.

Start with the conservative base. The SF Chronicle puts Airtable at roughly 800 employees before the acquisition. One analyst post says 935, but that comes from a single source, so treat 800 as the floor and 935 as the ceiling. People leaving get what the company calls "substantial separation packages."

In this article, retention rate means the share of pre-acquisition staff still employed once Bending Spoons finishes restructuring. The company has a long record on this:

The last two rows are my estimates, not disclosures. They take the observed 16 to 29% range and apply it to each company. The ~300 figure for "a few hundred" is also an assumption. The underlying figures come from Colin Keeley, Euronews, TechCrunch and Bending Spoons' own IPO filing, and they point the same way.

1,830

The reason is structural. According to Colin Keeley's write-up of its operating manual, Bending Spoons runs on a core of about 620 "Spooners." Even at the low estimate, Airtable came in with more employees than that entire core team. Bending Spoons doesn't absorb a company that size. It rebuilds the company around a small team that works the way Bending Spoons works.

The surviving teams tell you who was cut

Bending Spoons said publicly which Airtable teams are staying, so your sourcing pool is everyone outside those teams.

The named survivors come from an X post by Federico Simionato, who leads product at Bending Spoons:

• Core: a new team "shipping your top requests monthly"
• Performance: faster bases
• Infra: platform work, including higher record limits
• AI and enterprise controls: also kept in the restructured product

So the likely pool is:

• Growth and experimentation engineers
• Engineers behind the sales-led enterprise go-to-market motion
• Solutions engineers and support engineers
• Much of the product-surface engineering that sits outside Core's monthly roadmap
• Product managers and designers attached to those areas

Surviving teams still have fewer seats for Airtable veterans

It gets tighter than that. Savarese said experienced engineers, product managers and designers from across Bending Spoons had already joined Airtable. Even the teams that survived are partly staffed with Bending Spoons' own people. That means a legacy Airtable infra engineer isn't safe just because Infra survived. Lower their priority in your outreach, but keep them on the list.

Why these cuts say nothing about performance

Bending Spoons almost never loses its own people and lets most acquired staff go. Being cut from Airtable tells you about the acquirer's operating model, not the engineer's work. Lead with that point when you pitch these candidates to hiring managers.

0.6%

The gap between 0.6% and 16.2% is the business model at work. Bending Spoons keeps a small team to run what it buys and lets the rest go. Who stays depends on the org chart Bending Spoons wants, not on individual performance.

The acquirer is effectively saying the same thing. Simionato ended his post with: "If you're hiring, these are excellent people and worth a call." Put that line in your intake notes.

A Bending Spoons layoff describes the acquirer's org chart, not the engineer's work.

A "currently at Airtable" search is a cut list nobody has published

Profiles lag reality. Six days after the cut, most people still listing Airtable as their current employer are leavers who haven't updated yet. That makes a plain current-employer search the closest thing to a layoff list you'll get.

In Refolk's index of professional profiles, 164 profiles have "Airtable" in the headline along with an engineer or engineering-manager title. In a 25-person sample, 8 (32%) list Airtable as their current employer. Most of the rest are Airtable builders and consultants who use the product for clients, plus former staff now at Google, Meta and Figma. The sample clusters in the SF Bay Area and New York.

That breakdown also tells you where the noise is. "Airtable" is both an employer and a product skill, so a keyword search pulls in every no-code consultant with "Airtable expert" in their headline. Here's the filter sequence I use:

1. Pull everyone with Airtable as their current employer and an engineering, EM, PM or design title.
2. Strip out consultants, agencies and "Airtable builder" profiles.
3. Exclude anyone with Bending Spoons history. Those are the people sent in to staff the surviving teams.
4. Lower the priority of anyone whose recent work points clearly to Core, Performance or Infra.
5. Rank what's left against your open req.

Boolean search handles step 2 badly because the same word means two things. That's the gap Refolk closes: you describe the person in plain English, including who to leave out, and get back a ranked shortlist.

Where the Airtable pool lives, and who else wants it

Airtable's engineers are concentrated in the SF Bay Area and New York, and earlier Airtable alumni in the index sample went to Google, Meta and Figma. That's the competition your offer is measured against.

These people know they can go to a large platform company. Severance gives them time, so they'll compare offers instead of taking the first one. If you're a smaller company, your edge is scope. A growth engineer who worked on Airtable's enterprise motion can own the whole function somewhere else, which no Big Tech offer gives them.

You have weeks, not months

People left within the week of Oct 12 with generous severance. The strongest candidates aren't in a hurry, but they'll have offers within roughly two months. Your window is right now.

The timing matches what Bending Spoons has done before. WeTransfer closed in July 2024, and in September the company announced it would cut around 75% of the workforce, roughly 260 of 350 people. That's about six weeks from close to cut. Airtable took about five (Sept 4 to Oct 12). The layoffs are part of a repeatable playbook, not a reaction.

What works in outreach to this group:

• Name the team they were on and what you'd have them build. A generic "saw the news" message gets ignored.
• Bring up the operating model, not the layoff. Citing the 0.6% vs 16.2% gap shows you understand the cut wasn't about them.
• Respect the severance runway. Offer a short first call. These candidates aren't panicking, and pressure reads as desperation on your side.
• Get to a full loop within two weeks. Slow processes lose this pool to whoever moves first.

Miro is next, and it will be a European sourcing event

Bending Spoons' pending Miro acquisition puts about 1,600 people in 13 hubs at risk. Applying the 16 to 29% range gives 1,140 to 1,340 people potentially released. That release will probably be slower and more staggered than Airtable's, because much of Miro's headcount sits under European labor rules.

The facts so far:

• Deal size: enterprise value of $1.355B, with about $600M in annual recurring revenue according to Bending Spoons CEO Luca Ferrari (Sept 10, 2026 press release)
• Status: expected to close in Q4, subject to regulatory approvals. It isn't in the portfolio yet.
• Footprint: co-headquartered in San Francisco and Amsterdam, with the largest U.S. office in Austin
• Earlier cuts: about 7% in early 2023 and roughly 18% (some 275 people) in October 2024, so the 1,600 figure already reflects two rounds

Ferrari has said Bending Spoons will hold Miro "for the long term." That fits the playbook rather than contradicting it. Holding a product for the long term is not the same as keeping the team that came with it: Evernote kept 60 of 341. If the deal closes, Andrey Khusid, Miro's co-founder and CEO, will be running a company whose size is set by Bending Spoons' 620-person core model.

Plan Miro pipelines for Q1 2027

Airtable's talent sits in SF and New York. Miro's is spread across Amsterdam, Berlin, Austin and the rest of its 13 hubs. WeTransfer's cut had to go through local regulations, and Dutch and German layoff rules stretch the time between announcement and departure. Expect the release to come in waves and to run into Q1 2027.

Start mapping Miro engineers by hub now, before the deal closes. Ranking engineers across 13 hubs by hand is slow work. In Refolk you can ask for "senior Miro engineers in Amsterdam and Berlin" and get the list back in one pass.

The previous waves also show who you'll be competing with. In Refolk's index, 687 profiles mention Bending Spoons in the headline. In a 25-person sample, 18 (72%) still work there and 12 (48%) are based in Milan. Former Spooners showed up at WeTransfer, Vimeo, Qonto and On. The WeTransfer and Vimeo alumni are the clearest preview of the Miro pool: people who went through a Bending Spoons acquisition and then moved on.

FAQ

How many people did Airtable lay off after the Bending Spoons acquisition?

Neither company has given a number. Airtable had roughly 800 employees before the deal (one analyst source says 935). Applying Bending Spoons' observed 16 to 29% retention from Evernote, StreamYard, WeTransfer and the AOL, Eventbrite and Vimeo deals suggests about 530 to 800 people are out. That's an estimate, not a disclosure.

Which Airtable teams survived the cut?

Bending Spoons product lead Federico Simionato named a new Core team shipping top customer requests monthly, plus new Performance and Infra teams. AI and enterprise controls also continue. Bending Spoons has moved some of its own engineers, PMs and designers into Airtable, so even on those teams, fewer seats are left for legacy Airtable staff.

When will the Bending Spoons Miro acquisition layoffs happen?

The deal is expected to close in Q4 2026, subject to regulatory approvals. In past deals, Bending Spoons has announced cuts about five to six weeks after closing. With much of Miro's staff in the Netherlands and Germany, local layoff rules will likely spread departures out, so plan sourcing pipelines for Q1 2027.

Are laid-off Airtable engineers a quality risk?

No. Only 0.6% of Bending Spoons' core team quit in 2025, while overall turnover was 16.2%, almost all of it among acquired staff. The cuts come from how Bending Spoons runs acquired companies, not from individual performance. Bending Spoons' own product lead publicly called the departing people "worth a call."