Howie Liu

Current role and company

Howie Liu is co-founder and chief executive of Airtable, a San Francisco cloud collaboration company that blends the ease of a spreadsheet with the structure of a database so non-programmers can build their own applications. Wikipedia lists Liu, Andrew Ofstad and Emmett Nicholas as the founders and notes that the company was formerly named Formagrid Inc.^[1]

In August 2026 Liu's company agreed to be acquired. Verdict reported that Italian technology group Bending Spoons announced on August 5, 2026 that it would buy Airtable for $1.28 billion in cash, an implied equity value of nearly $2.25 billion once Airtable's net cash is included. Both boards approved the terms unanimously, and closing was expected later in the year subject to regulatory approvals. Until then the two companies were to operate independently.^[2]

Scale

In the deal announcement, Airtable cited annual recurring revenue of roughly $480 million as of June 2026, up more than 20 percent year on year, and said that more than 500,000 organizations use the platform, including 80 percent of the Fortune 100, according to Liu.^[2]

Before Airtable

Liu's first company was Etacts, a contact-management start-up that Salesforce acquired. A 2020 Station F interview with him covers that chapter and how the Airtable idea followed from it.^[3]

Building Airtable

The same interview says Airtable took roughly three years to build before it reached the market. Liu argued there that a product has to be far better than the existing option to make people change a habit, and that for Airtable the habit to break was working in Excel or Google Sheets. He also said he wanted to make software creation accessible to more people.^[3]

Wikipedia's funding timeline traces the company's growth: seed money in 2015 from investors including Caffeinated Capital, Freestyle Capital, Data Collective and CrunchFund; a $52 million Series B in March 2018 and a $100 million Series C in November 2018; a $185 million Series D in September 2020; a $270 million Series E in March 2021 led by Greenoaks; and a $735 million Series F in December 2021 that raised the valuation to $11 billion. The article carries maintenance tags, so these figures are best treated as secondary reporting.^[1]

Hard years and the AI pivot

Wikipedia records two rounds of layoffs: about 254 employees, roughly a fifth of staff, in December 2022 with three executives leaving, and about 237 more in September 2023. In 2023 the company began a beta of Airtable AI, and in June 2025 it relaunched as an AI-native app.^[1]

The same article lists later AI steps: the October 2025 acquisition of DeepSky, formerly Gradient, an AI research start-up, alongside the hiring of David Azose, previously of OpenAI, as chief technology officer, and the January 2026 launch of Hyperagent, a standalone product that coordinates specialized AI agents working in parallel on research and analysis.^[1]

Outlook after the sale

In the Bending Spoons announcement Liu said the partnership would give Airtable the resources to pursue its vision, and the buyer's chief executive, Luca Ferrari, said the company was committed to investing in Airtable for the long run. Wikipedia adds that the acquisition was followed by an announced layoff affecting a large portion of the company. Verdict notes the deal was Bending Spoons' third of 2026 after AOL in January and Eventbrite in March.^[2][1]

Why he matters

Liu is one of the best-known figures in no-code software. Having sold one company to Salesforce, he spent more than a decade turning a deceptively simple table into a platform that large enterprises treat as infrastructure, and then led the company through a valuation peak, cost cuts and a repositioning around AI agents. Whether Airtable thrives under Bending Spoons is the next test of that bet.^[1][2][3]

On The Executive List

Howie Liu is ranked No. 73 on The Executive List (October 2026) in the Chief Executive Officers discipline. The ranking reflects The Executive Review's own editorial Trending Score; it is not an outside award, and placement on the list is never sold. View the October 2026 edition.