Three different kinds of buyer absorbed three product companies in six days.

Between August 4 and August 8: Bending Spoons agreed to buy Airtable ($1.285B EV, 2.7x ARR), Klaviyo agreed to acquire AI customer-success startup Agency, and OpenAI acquired NextSlide. The buyers have nothing in common: a public app consolidator, an e-commerce marketing platform, a frontier model lab. But each bought a company whose product was a standalone subscription and folded it into something not sold by the seat. The exit path for a mid-market AI-native app is now absorption into a larger surface, at multiples set by the acquirer's category rather than the target's growth rate. 2.7x ARR for Airtable is the number to sit with.