Brian Nichols is the co-founder of Angel Squad, a community where you’ll learn how to angel invest and get a chance to invest as little as $1k into Hustle Fund's top performing early-stage startups

Airtable raised at an $11.7 billion valuation in December 2021. As of mid-2026, secondary buyers are paying somewhere between a quarter and a third of that. For a company most people still think of as a category leader, that gap is the whole story.

Here's the tension. Airtable is a genuinely good business. Roughly 90% gross margins, more than 500,000 organizations, 80% of the Fortune 100, and per the CEO, about half the cash it ever raised still sitting in the bank. It's also a 2021-vintage SaaS company that priced at the absolute top of the market, and the secondary market has spent three years repricing it back to earth.

This guide is built for the accredited investor assessing private-market exposure, not retail buyers waiting for a ticker symbol. You'll learn how pre-IPO shares actually work, what the numbers say, and the one risk that matters most when you buy common stock in a company trading below its last round.

What Airtable Pre-IPO Shares Are (and What They Are Not)

Pre-IPO shares in a private company are usually existing shares sold by an employee, founder, or early investor in a secondary transaction. They are not publicly traded equity, and they do not come with continuous market pricing, broad SEC reporting, or automatic liquidity.

The distinction between a primary round and a secondary matters. A primary round creates new shares issued by the company and adds cash to the balance sheet. A secondary sale transfers ownership between private parties without funding company operations. Primary rounds often reset valuation benchmarks and rights packages. Secondaries usually reflect liquidity needs, bargaining power, and information gaps.

This matters more than usual for Airtable, because its last primary round is now badly out of date. The $11.7 billion mark was set in 2021. Every secondary print since has been a negotiation in a very different market, against a very different set of comps, with no fresh primary round to reset the number.

What is the Current Valuation of Airtable?

Airtable's last primary valuation is $11.7 billion, set in the $785 million Series F round that closed in December 2021, led by XN with participation from Salesforce and Franklin Resources at roughly $187.28 per share. The company has raised more than $1.4 billion in total across nine rounds from investors including Coatue, Thrive Capital, CRV, and Benchmark.

The secondary market tells a different story. Notice.co marks Airtable around $42.21 per share in June 2026, an implied market capitalization near $2.63 billion, which it flags as roughly 77% below the last round valuation. Sacra cites CEO Howie Liu stating in January 2026 that shares had traded on secondary markets at approximately $4 billion, a roughly 66% decline from the 2021 peak.

Those two figures are not identical, and the gap is worth naming directly. The Notice mark and the CEO's quoted secondary level frame a range, very roughly $2.6 billion to $4 billion, rather than a single clean price. Notice also notes that Airtable currently has low market activity with no active buyers or sellers, so any single print should be read as a thin-market data point, not a market-clearing price. The honest read is a steep discount to the 2021 round, with real uncertainty about exactly where a motivated buyer and seller would meet today.

At its simplest, Airtable is a collaborative database. You build relational tables, views, forms, and dashboards, then automate workflows and connect to other tools, all without writing code. Under CEO Howie Liu, the company announced a "refounding" as an AI-native company in 2025, with conversational AI as the default interface through products like Omni and Field Agents, and its first standalone product in 13 years, Superagent, launched in January 2026.

How Does Airtable Generate Revenue?

Airtable generates revenue through a per-seat B2B SaaS model: a free tier, paid Plus and Pro plans, and enterprise plans for larger organizations needing SSO and advanced controls. Sacra estimates ARR reached roughly $478 million in 2024, growing about 27.5% year over year from $375 million in 2023. Notice.co's estimate lines up closely at about $470 million for 2024.

Two things stand out in the revenue picture. First, growth has been decelerating: roughly 60% in 2022, 50% in 2023, and 27.5% in 2024. Second, the quality of that revenue looks strong. Sacra reports roughly 90% gross margins as of August 2025 and 170% net dollar retention in the enterprise segment, which outpaces public comparables like Asana and Monday.com in their largest customer cohorts.

The AI-native pivot is the swing factor. Every plan, including the free tier, now bundles AI capabilities and credits, and Superagent introduces a separate AI-SaaS pricing model running from roughly $20 to $200 per user per month. Management has signaled it will prioritize growing the AI business over defending those 90% gross margins, which is a deliberate bet that AI re-accelerates growth even if it pressures near-term profitability.

Why Are Investors Bullish on Airtable?

The bull case is that Airtable is a quality asset trading at a distressed-looking price. High gross margins, strong enterprise retention, a large installed base, and roughly half its raised capital still in the bank, which the CEO has described as throwing off cash. That is a very different risk profile from a cash-burning company that needs to raise again soon at a lower mark.

The second pillar is the AI re-rating. HyperDB, announced in March 2026, lets Airtable tables hold up to 100 million rows with direct connections to Snowflake, Databricks, and Salesforce, pushing it toward system-of-record workloads it could not previously touch. If the AI-native repositioning lands, Airtable expands from internal tracking into decision support and knowledge-work automation, a much larger market than no-code app building alone.

Differentiation is the crux, and it is not settled. Airtable competes against all-in-one workspaces like Notion and Coda, automation layers like Zapier, the cloud suites from Google and Microsoft, and work-OS platforms like Monday.com and Smartsheet. Our very own Hustle Fund GP, Elizabeth Yin, has made the point that in crowded markets a product needs to be 10x different and 10x better than the alternatives, not just incrementally nicer. Airtable's relational depth and AI front door are a real argument for that, but every one of those competitors is also racing to bundle AI, so the bet is that Airtable's data model plus AI is durably differentiated rather than quickly matched.

What Are the Biggest Risks for Airtable Investors?

The two biggest company-level risks are decelerating growth into a brutally competitive market and the execution risk of a full AI-native rebuild. Both feed directly into whether the discount is a bargain or a trap.

Competition and the Growth Slowdown

The competitive set presses from every direction. Notion and Coda pull users toward unified docs-plus-databases. Zapier and n8n absorb simple workflows. Google Sheets and Microsoft Excel remain the default canvases for most people, shipping inside suites with billions of users. Monday.com and Smartsheet standardize cross-team work with governance and reporting. Growth decelerating to 27.5% while AI commoditizes parts of the no-code stack is the core worry: if Airtable cannot re-accelerate, even a discounted entry can look expensive in hindsight.

The AI pivot is both the upside and a risk. A "refounding" that overhauls product architecture and prioritizes AI is a heavy lift, and management has openly said it will trade gross margin for AI growth. If that spend does not convert into durable re-acceleration, investors get the worst of both worlds: lower margins and still-slow growth.

The Risks Investors Underprice: The Preference Stack, Liquidity, and Information Asymmetry

For Airtable specifically, the liquidation preference stack is the risk that matters most, and it is the one secondary buyers most often miss. Because the company is trading below its last round, the roughly $1.4 billion of preferred stock raised across prior rounds sits ahead of common in any exit. Airtable's preferred carries a 1x non-participating preference, so in a strong outcome preferred converts and everyone shares the upside. But in a middling exit, preferred takes its money back first and common absorbs the shortfall. Notice's own waterfall illustrates this starkly: model an M&A exit near the current $2.63 billion implied value and common comes out around $25.53 per share, well below recent secondary prints in the low $40s. Anyone buying common today should read liquidation preference: the term sheet clause that actually matters before wiring, because it is the difference between a discount and a wipeout.

Liquidity risk compounds that. Notice describes Airtable as having low market activity with no active buyers or sellers at the time of the report. Thin markets mean wide spreads, slow fills, and prints that may not reflect where you could actually exit. With no IPO announced, you should underwrite a multi-year hold and the real chance that interim liquidity simply is not there when you want it. It helps to plan for liquidity events from day one rather than assuming an exit window appears.

Information asymmetry is the structural advantage every seller has over you. Private companies don't file public quarterlies, and you're often buying common stock from an employee or early holder who has more visibility into the AI pivot's traction than you do. As Elizabeth has noted, valuations aren't about the "worth" of a company. They're about supply and demand among investors. Airtable's discount is partly a demand problem, few motivated buyers in a thin market, and a thin-demand price is not the same thing as a proven bargain.

Is Airtable Overvalued at Its Last Round, or Undervalued on the Secondary?

This is the rare pre-IPO name where the more interesting question is whether it's cheap, not whether it's expensive. The $11.7 billion Series F priced at roughly 75x Airtable's 2021 revenue of about $156 million. On its face, a peak-of-cycle number.

Revenue has roughly tripled since, while the secondary price has fallen hard. Against estimated 2024 ARR near $478 million, the last-round valuation implies about 24x revenue, but the actual secondary market is pricing the company far lower. At an implied market cap of roughly $2.6 billion (Notice) to $4 billion (the CEO's cited secondary level), buyers today are paying somewhere around 5.5x to 8.4x trailing ARR. Notice's own price-to-sales figure for 2024 sits near 7.2x, consistent with that range.

The trajectory underneath those multiples shows both the strength and the slowdown. ARR ran from roughly $250 million in 2022 (up about 60%) to roughly $375 million in 2023 (up about 50%) to roughly $470 to $478 million in 2024 (up about 27.5%), against the roughly $156 million of 2021 revenue that the $11.7 billion last round was priced on. Growing, but decelerating sharply.

So the compression is real: from 75x at the 2021 round to roughly 6-8x on the secondary today. That can mean the market is handing patient buyers a quality SaaS asset at a software-average multiple. It can also mean the market is correctly pricing decelerating growth, AI disruption risk, and a preference stack that disadvantages common. A sophisticated buyer does not assume which one applies without diligence.

One genuine positive separates Airtable from most discounted private names: it has disclosed strong economics. Roughly 90% gross margins and, per the CEO, about half its raised capital still in the bank and generating cash. Unlike a company with no earnings floor, Airtable has a balance sheet that buys it time to prove the AI pivot. That does not make the equity cheap on its own, but it lowers the odds of a forced down-round that would crush common further.

The Diligence That Actually Matters: Terms Every Buyer Should Understand

The industry myth in pre-IPO secondaries is that a price below the last primary round means you're getting a discount. Seasoned buyers know that gap often reflects share class differences, liquidation preference stacking, or transfer restrictions that materially change what you actually own. The real due diligence isn't the headline valuation; it's the cap table position, the information rights, and the legal structure of what's being transferred. Due diligence: what actually matters and what doesn't is a useful filter for where to spend your energy.

Here are the terms that determine your actual outcome:

Cap table: The company's ownership ledger showing who owns what securities. Reading it badly can make a small stake look larger than it really is.

Fully diluted ownership: Your percentage assuming all options, warrants, and convertibles become shares. Fully diluted math is the only honest way to judge ownership.

Share class: Common stock or preferred stock. This drives outcomes more than the headline valuation. For a company trading below its last round, the difference between buying common and buying preferred is enormous.

Liquidation preference: The payout priority preferred stockholders get in an exit before common stockholders see anything. Airtable's preferred is 1x non-participating, which is founder-and-common friendly in a strong exit but still senior to common in a weak one.

Option pool: Shares reserved for employees and future hires. Pool refreshes are a quiet, common source of dilution.

409A valuation: An independent valuation used for tax and option-pricing purposes. A 409A can sit well below, or above, a negotiated secondary price because tax valuation and liquidity pricing solve different problems.

Information rights: Whether you'll get financials, updates, and visibility after you buy. Common stockholders often get none. Without information rights, you can't monitor the AI pivot you're underwriting.

Pro rata rights: Whether you can participate in future rounds to defend your ownership against dilution. Most secondary buyers of common don't get these, which is why understanding anti-dilution provisions matters.

Right of first refusal (ROFR) and transfer restrictions: Company consent rights that can block or match your transaction even after you've signed. Airtable allows direct transfers, but a signed purchase agreement still does not guarantee ownership until approvals clear.

Lockup: Post-IPO restrictions on selling, typically 180 days. Your liquidity event isn't the IPO; it's the lockup expiration.

If a seller or platform can't explain these clearly for the specific shares being offered, that opacity is itself a risk signal.

Eligibility and Compliance: Accredited Investor, Qualified Purchaser, and Reg D Rules

Most direct private-market offerings for individuals are limited to accredited investors, based on income, net worth, or certain credentials. Qualified purchaser status can matter when the deal is packaged through a pooled fund vehicle, and that higher threshold often determines which structures a manager can use.

Regulation D frames how most of these deals are offered. Rule 506(b) limits general solicitation and typically relies on pre-existing relationships. Rule 506(c) permits broader marketing but requires stricter verification of accredited status.

The compliance plumbing is not optional. KYC and AML checks, identity verification, source-of-funds review, FINRA-supervised broker-dealer involvement, and escrow exist because private securities carry fraud, sanctions, and suitability risks that are harder to spot when there is no public market transparency. Treat these steps as protective infrastructure, not paperwork friction.

Deal Mechanics: Direct Secondary, SPV, and the Fee Stack

A direct secondary transaction gives you ownership of the transferred shares, subject to company approval and transfer terms. An SPV gives you exposure through a pooled vehicle, which can simplify administration but adds a layer of fees, reduces direct governance, and limits your visibility into the underlying issuer. Watch for two structures in particular:

Nested SPVs. Sometimes an SPV invests into another SPV rather than directly into the company. Each layer stacks its own management fee and carry, and pushes you one more step away from the cap table and from any information rights. In a thinly traded name like Airtable, that distance matters because you may have no independent way to verify what the vehicle actually holds.

Forward purchase contracts. Some "access" to private shares is not share ownership at all but a contract that promises to deliver shares or their economic value at a future event such as an IPO. That means synthetic exposure with no actual shares until settlement, plus counterparty risk: if the seller fails to deliver, you are an unsecured creditor of whoever wrote the contract, not an Airtable shareholder. Read carefully whether you are buying shares or a promise.

Escrow is the bridge between signing and settlement. If ROFR is triggered or company approval stalls, your money may sit in process while the economics remain uncertain. Your all-in cost is rarely just the share price either. It can include the negotiated spread, platform fees, broker-dealer commission, legal review, admin charges, and SPV overhead, and in thin private markets that fee stack can turn a decent entry into a mediocre one before the company even changes in value. An indication of interest is not an allocation.

Where Accredited Investors May Access Airtable Shares in 2026

Access usually comes through a few categories. Each has different mechanics, minimums, and information rights.

Secondary market platforms. Platforms like Forge Global, Hiive, EquityZen, and Notice list pre-IPO names, though Airtable's thin activity means quotes can be stale or sparse. Compare across platforms and scrutinize share class, information rights, and transfer terms before transacting.

Pre-IPO and crossover funds. Some funds hold legacy Airtable positions from prior rounds. You get diversification but limited control over the specific name and entry price.

Public proxies. Salesforce participated in Airtable's Series F, so a sliver of indirect exposure exists through public holders, though it is heavily diluted and not a clean way to express an Airtable view.

Angel syndicates and investing communities. These occasionally surface SPV access to growth-stage software names. This is part of why a community like Angel Squad can be useful: Hustle Fund is an early-stage fund, but it shares full-spectrum deal flow with Squad members that runs from pre-seed all the way through pre-IPO, so the same membership that teaches you to read an early-stage deal can also surface late-stage secondary opportunities when they appear.

How This Differs From Early-Stage Venture Access

Late-stage pre-IPO secondaries behave differently from early-stage venture access. Ecosystems and networks adjacent to firms like 500 Startups, accelerators like Y Combinator and Techstars, and platforms like AngelList and SeedInvest teach useful pattern recognition for evaluating founders and product-market fit. That literacy is genuinely valuable, but a discounted late-stage SaaS secondary is a different animal: you're underwriting price, share class, and the preference stack rather than a founder bet.

That said, the muscle you build evaluating early-stage deals, reading cap tables, asking sharp questions, sizing positions, is the same muscle you use for late-stage secondaries. Investors who only ever look at one stage tend to be worse at both.

Liquidity, Lockups, and Exit Paths

There are several exit paths for private-company shares, and each has different timing and return implications. An acquisition, tender offer, direct listing, conventional IPO, or extended private status can all produce very different outcomes for common shareholders, and for a below-last-round name the preference stack shapes every one of them. For a wider view of how public-market windows shape these exits, see the IPO market for angel investors.

Airtable has not announced IPO plans, and with a strong cash position it is under less pressure to rush one. That cuts both ways: less risk of a desperate down-round, but also no near-term catalyst to reprice the secondary upward. Buyers today should underwrite a multi-year hold and the possibility that liquidity arrives, if at all, through a tender offer or an eventual listing rather than a quick flip.

Portfolio allocation and position sizing matter more than conviction in long-duration private assets. A smart investor treats a single private secondary as one part of a broader portfolio because uncertainty around timing, dilution, and the preference waterfall can overwhelm even a strong company thesis.

Bottom Line

Airtable is a quality business going through a hard repricing. Strong margins, real enterprise retention, a large base, cash in the bank, and a credible AI-native pivot, all trading at a steep discount to a frothy 2021 peak. That combination is genuinely interesting.

But the discount is not a free lunch. Growth has slowed, the competitive field is crowded with well-funded players bundling AI, and most importantly, common buyers sit behind a roughly $1.4 billion preference stack in any modest exit. Whether this is a good investment depends far less on whether you like the product and far more on what share class you buy, the price you pay against that waterfall, and how patient your capital can be.

The investors who do best in private markets stay allergic to hype, read the documents, and remember that structure often matters as much as story. With Airtable, structure may matter most of all.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Airtable publicly traded? No. Airtable is a private company and does not trade on any public exchange. There is no Airtable ticker symbol. Accredited investors can access shares through secondary platforms like Forge Global, Hiive, EquityZen, and Notice, through crossover funds holding legacy positions, or through angel investing communities that occasionally surface SPV access.

What is Airtable's current valuation? Airtable's last primary valuation is $11.7 billion, set in its December 2021 Series F. As of mid-2026, secondary marks imply a far lower figure, roughly $2.6 billion (Notice.co) to $4 billion (a level CEO Howie Liu cited for secondary trades in January 2026), reflecting a steep discount to the 2021 peak.

Who owns Airtable? Airtable was co-founded by CEO Howie Liu, Andrew Ofstad, and Emmett Nicholas. Notable investors include XN, Salesforce, Franklin Resources, Coatue, Thrive Capital, CRV, and Benchmark.

Is Airtable profitable? Airtable has not published full profitability figures, but Sacra reports roughly 90% gross margins as of August 2025, and CEO Howie Liu has said about half the capital Airtable raised remains in the bank and is generating cash. That is a stronger balance-sheet position than most discounted private names.

Why is Airtable's secondary price below its last round? The $11.7 billion mark was set at the 2021 market peak on a roughly 75x revenue multiple. Since then, growth has decelerated, software multiples have compressed market-wide, and the secondary market has repriced the company to a single-digit revenue multiple. Thin trading activity adds further noise to any single print.

How can accredited investors buy Airtable stock? Through secondary platforms, crossover funds with legacy positions, and angel communities that source SPV access. Each path has different minimums, fees, compliance steps, and information rights. Given Airtable's preference stack and thin liquidity, sophisticated buyers verify share class, transfer restrictions, ROFR language, and the exit waterfall before transacting.