From annual recurring revenue (ARR) of $4.5M in 2017, the company's ARR increased to $16M in 2018, marking a 256% year-over-year (YoY) growth. The following year, in 2019, ARR grew to $36M for a 127% YoY increase. Growth continued with ARR rising to $81M in 2020, for 124% YoY growth.

By 2021, ARR reached $156M, with a 92% YoY increase, and in 2022, it further escalated to $250M, reflecting 60% YoY growth. In 2023, Airtable's ARR grew 50% YoY to $375M.

Airtable was last valued at $11.7 billion following its Series F funding round in December 2021. The company has raised a total of $1.353 billion across 10 funding rounds. The Series F round attracted prominent investors including Coatue, D1 Capital Partners, and Salesforce Ventures. Other notable investors in previous rounds include Benchmark, Thrive Capital, and ICONIQ Growth.

Airtable offers a collaborative SaaS platform designed to streamline data management for organizations. It combines a spreadsheet interface with relational database functionality, aiming to simplify software creation and empower non-technical users to customize applications without coding.

The core feature of Airtable is its table interface, resembling traditional spreadsheet applications but with enhanced database capabilities. This allows users to establish complex relationships between different datasets, facilitating comprehensive data organization and interconnectivity. Users can integrate various data types, including tasks, project timelines, inventory lists, and rich media such as images and links.

The platform provides versatile viewing options, including grid, kanban, calendar, gallery, and Gantt chart views, each offering dynamic filters and customization features. These options cater to diverse project and operational requirements, allowing users to visualize and interact with data according to their preferences.

Airtable offers additional functionality through its "apps" and automation features, enabling workflow automation, integration with third-party applications, and the creation of custom dashboards for real-time data monitoring. This allows users to streamline tasks such as reminders, content scheduling, and publication across different business functions.

With its intuitive interface, Airtable supports a range of CRUD operations (create, read, update, delete), making it suitable for various business needs including marketing, product development, inventory management, and operational workflows. The platform fosters collaboration, efficiency, and innovation within organizations.

In summary, Airtable provides a flexible and user-friendly solution for data management and application development. Its emphasis on customization, automation, and collaboration positions it as a valuable tool for enhancing business productivity and data management practices.

Airtable operates as a B2B SaaS collaboration platform, offering a flexible pricing structure based on a per-seat model and tailored plans to accommodate different organizational requirements. The pricing tiers include a free plan, along with two paid options: Plus at $10 per month and Pro at $20 per month per seat, with an enterprise plan available for larger organizations needing advanced features like single sign-on (SSO) and identity federation.

The Plus and Pro plans offer a comprehensive suite of features to address diverse organizational needs. Notably, the Pro plan provides unlimited app usage, supports up to 50,000 records per base, and includes personalized views, advanced organization options, custom scripting capabilities, and data synchronization from various external sources, including Salesforce. These features are particularly advantageous for larger teams or those demanding more sophisticated data management and control mechanisms.

Airtable's growth strategy revolves around increasing seat numbers and raising per-seat prices. This entails enhancing the platform's utility across organizations and developing features to foster adoption across different departments, thus expanding the user base and facilitating transitions to higher-priced tiers.

The company adopts a modified "land and expand" approach akin to product-led growth (PLG) strategies. Initial adoption typically starts at grassroots levels within organizations, with teams utilizing Airtable for tasks such as content tracking, operations management, social media scheduling, and product management. The platform's versatility and ease of use facilitate adoption across various teams.

To facilitate expansion, Airtable's customer success and services teams are pivotal. They engage with organizations to drive deeper adoption, assist in base design, and provide training and certifications, ensuring maximum value extraction and integration into workflows, thereby enhancing stickiness and reducing churn.

Additionally, Airtable identifies upsell opportunities through user behavior analysis, monitoring factors such as data volume, app usage, integrations, and collaboration patterns. This data-driven approach enables tailored engagement and upsell strategies, facilitating transitions to higher-tier plans.

In summary, Airtable's business model is characterized by adaptability, scalability, and a profound understanding of organizational dynamics. The strategic emphasis on expanding within organizations, combined with robust service offerings, positions Airtable to sustain growth by delivering value across teams, increasing seat sales, and achieving higher price points.

Airtable's market potential mirrors the trajectory of Roblox's remarkable growth, from its modest beginnings to becoming a platform with over 200 million monthly active users (MAUs) and exceeding 3 billion hours of cumulative monthly playtime. Initially, Roblox's growth was steady, increasing from its inception in 2006 to 9 million MAUs by 2016. However, the platform experienced exponential growth thereafter, reaching 48 million MAUs one year later, 70 million the following year, and surpassing 100 million by the end of 2019.

Roblox's success stems from its unique position as a sandboxed platform, enabling users to create and interact within a vast array of user-developed games and experiences. Despite its simplistic, almost retro graphics, Roblox capitalized on low entry barriers and the potential for creators to design complex interactive experiences, facilitating a surge in user engagement and content creation. In 2020, Roblox paid out $329 million to its creator community, highlighting the platform's lucrative ecosystem for user-developers.

Airtable, drawing parallels with Roblox, seeks to tap into a significant untapped market by serving as a bridge between various SaaS verticals. Its goal is to target the "whitespace" — the workflows and processes that teams cobble together using less efficient tools due to the lack of a perfect fit solution. Airtable's approach, similar to Roblox's strategy of enabling user-generated content, focuses on empowering users to create custom SaaS applications. This initiative was bolstered last year with the introduction of extensible apps and an open API, evidenced by the publication of 150 open source apps for Airtable by the user community on Github.

The potential market for Airtable's innovative approach to SaaS solutions is vast. By positioning itself as a versatile platform that fills the gaps between existing SaaS products, Airtable aims to dominate a market segment that, like Roblox's, could be worth billions. Specifically, Airtable targets the enterprise sector by offering specialized, verticalized packages such as "Airtable for Marketing," catering to specific workflows while maintaining the platform's inherent flexibility and customization capabilities.

Airtable's strategy to expand its Total Addressable Market (TAM) involves making its platform more accessible to a broader audience within enterprises. This involves moving beyond its roots as a builder tool to offering more structured, job-specific solutions with "no-code benefits." The launch of specialized products, coupled with a services arm to ensure successful deployment, allows Airtable to command a higher price per seat, improve retention, and pave the way for further expansion within organizations.

HubSpot's marketing site for its marketing suite vs. Airtable's vertical marketing product

To fully realize its TAM expansion potential, Airtable is exploring product shifts akin to Salesforce's approach, creating layers of abstraction that make the platform more comprehensible and accessible to non-builders. This includes evolving Airtable apps to function independently of the main base, facilitating easier interaction with company data by a wider range of stakeholders.

In the enterprise, Airtable's GTM is fundamentally the same as it is today—only with verticalized packages to facilitate expansion.

By adopting this strategy, Airtable aims to increase its footprint within organizations, driving up the number of seats, enhancing average revenue per user (ARPU), and improving retention. This vision positions Airtable as a pivotal player in the enterprise space, capable of serving both creators and consumers within organizations, mirroring the success story of Roblox in the gaming world. With the potential to become a sandbox app that equally enables consumption and creation, Airtable's journey towards capturing a significant share of the enterprise market may mirror Roblox's path to becoming a $45 billion company, albeit on a potentially lengthy timeline.