Airtable is an American cloud collaboration service company headquartered in San Francisco. It was founded in 2012 by Howie Liu, Andrew Ofstad, and Emmett Nicholas.
Airtable is a spreadsheet-database hybrid, with the features of a database but applied to a spreadsheet. The fields in an Airtable table are similar to cells in a spreadsheet, but have types such as 'checkbox', 'phone number', and 'drop-down list', and can reference file attachments like images.[1][2]
Users can create a database, set up column types, add records, link tables to one another, collaborate, sort records and publish views to external websites. Users cannot download their database in full, but can download some of the data by manually downloading CSVs for each table.[3]
History
Financing
In February 2015, Airtable raised $3 million from Caffeinated Capital, Freestyle Capital, Data Collective, and CrunchFund.[4] In May 2015, the company secured an additional $7.6 million in funding from Charles River Ventures and Ashton Kutcher.[5] In March 2018, Airtable raised $52 million in Series B funding, followed by the announcement of the launch of Airtable Blocks.[6] In November 2018 it raised $100 million in Series C funding.[7] In September 2020, Airtable raised $185 million in Series D funding.[8] This was followed by a Series E funding round in March 2021, where Airtable secured $270 million,[9] led by Greenoaks with participation from WndrCo, Caffeinated Capital, CRV, and Thrive.[10] The company's growth culminated in December 2021 when Airtable raised $735 million in a Series F funding round, boosting its valuation to $11 billion.[11]
Product Changes
April 2015: Airtable launches its API and embedded databases.[12]
July 2015: Introduced Airtable Forms to collect and organize data.[13]
August 2015: Airtable made "Add to Slack" option available to integrate Airtable with Slack.[14]
December 2015: Airtable redesigned its iOS app.[15]
December 2015: Airtable introduced barcode as new field type.[16]
June 2023: Airtable launched a beta program and expanding access to Airtable AI.
Layoffs
December 2022: Airtable CEO and co-founder Howie Liu informed employees that a fifth of them would be laid off, stating: “In trying to do too many things at once, we have grown our organization at a breakneck pace over the past few years....We will continue to emphasize growth, but do so by investing heavily in the levers that yield the highest growth relative to their cost.”[17]
September 2023: Airtable lays off an additional 27% (237) of its employees.[18]
