Howie Liu

Overview

Howie Liu is the co-founder and chief executive of Airtable, the no-code platform that combines a spreadsheet’s familiarity with a relational database’s power so non-programmers can build their own business software (Forbes). He built it unusually slowly — three years from first work to public launch — took it to a valuation above $11 billion in 2021, rebuilt it for the AI-agent era in 2025–2026, and sold it to Bending Spoons for $1.28 billion in cash in 2026 (Forbes; TechCrunch).

Early life and education

Liu grew up in College Station, Texas, the son of Korean parents who had been raised in China (Forbes). His father earned a biochemistry PhD at Texas A&M, while his mother, an engineer in China, worked minimum-wage jobs in the United States, including at McDonald’s and as a seamstress (Forbes). She gave him books on Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, and Liu later said he probably read four biographies of Gates (Forbes).

At 13, Liu taught himself to code in C++ after finding an unread training book in his father’s office (Forbes). At 16 he went to Duke University, graduating in 2009 with a degree in mechanical engineering and public policy (Forbes). He landed a software development job in San Jose at Accenture, at a salary higher than his parents’ combined income, but never started: the night before his start date he decided instead to try a startup, saying he had no financial resources to fall back on (Forbes).

Etacts, Salesforce, and the long road to Airtable

Liu’s first company was Etacts, a four-person venture that aggregated messages from email, Facebook and Twitter (Forbes). In 2010 it won a place in Y Combinator, and later that year Liu sold it to Salesforce, netting what Forbes described as a million-dollar payday and a job building a chat product (Forbes). At Salesforce he liked the people and the salary but felt the pull to start something new again, and he left in 2012 (Forbes).

What followed was deliberately unhurried. Liu travelled, read philosophy and design theory, and experimented with colour theory through painting and sculpture (Forbes). Meanwhile Andrew Ofstad, a Duke classmate on sabbatical from a project manager job at Google, began working with him on small programs (Forbes). Airtable took shape in 2012, was founded in 2013, and raised $3 million from Caffeinated Capital and Freestyle Capital in March 2013 (Forbes). The Stanford Daily agrees on the timeline: Liu founded Airtable in early 2013, and he and co-founders Ofstad and Emmett Nicholas spent three years building it before its 2015 launch (The Stanford Daily).

Liu’s explanation for the pace became his management signature. “Instead of trying to rush a new product out the door, we introduce a period of forced delay, so people have a chance to sleep on an idea,” he said, calling the practice “the simmer” (Forbes). He told a Stanford audience the same lesson: establish a clear vision early, build prototypes, and gather customer feedback (The Stanford Daily). In 2012 the founders had already written an internal vision deck describing a five-plus-year roadmap (The Stanford Daily).

From public launch to unicorn scale

Airtable launched its first database to the public in the winter of 2015, with fewer than ten employees, and collected another $8 million in funding a few months later (Forbes). The product was a collaborative spreadsheet that could store images, documents, videos and URLs in cells, with a relational database underneath; its “blocks” let users overlay data on maps, apply formulas, and send alerts, so anyone could assemble sales pipelines and editorial calendars that previously required code writers (Forbes).

By 2018 the slow build was paying off. Airtable had taken hold in 80,000 organisations, from Netflix — which used it to run its post-production pipeline — to small non-profits, and revenue was on track to jump 400 percent to $20 million, mostly on word of mouth (Forbes). Investors followed: in March 2018 Airtable raised $59 million from CRV, Caffeinated Capital and Slow Ventures, and later that year another $100 million from Benchmark, Thrive Capital and Coatue Management at a post-money valuation of $1.1 billion (Forbes). Liu, whose equity stake had fallen to 10 percent by then, framed the dilution as buying insurance: capital in the bank let the company prioritise ideas that might not pay out for years (Forbes).

By the 2021 peak Airtable was valued at over $11 billion, having raised more than $1.4 billion across funding rounds (TechCrunch). Earlier in 2026, its shares were trading on secondary markets at about a $4 billion valuation (TechCrunch).

The AI refounding and the 2026 sale

Liu’s answer to the AI wave was to rebuild rather than bolt on features. In June 2025 Airtable relaunched itself as an AI-native app platform, calling the moment a “refounding”: its new Omni agent builds apps conversationally from Airtable’s existing production-tested components — in Liu’s phrase, turning Airtable into “a powerful parts bin” — with AI capabilities on every plan, including the free plan (Maginative). In January 2026 the company unveiled Superagent, an orchestration platform that lets users spin up a team of AI agents to do tasks (TechCrunch).

The sale followed within months. On 4 August 2026 Bending Spoons, in its first acquisition since going public at an $18 billion valuation in July, agreed to buy Airtable for $1.28 billion in cash (TechCrunch). With Airtable’s net cash, the equity value was about $2.25 billion, against annual recurring revenue of approximately $480 million, growing over 20 percent year on year as of June 2026, from more than 500,000 organisations including 80 percent of the Fortune 100 (TechCrunch). Liu framed the deal as giving Airtable “the resources and the long-term commitment” to build the AI-native platform of the future (TechCrunch). Bending Spoons completed the acquisition in September 2026, acquiring 100 percent of Airtable’s shares in an all-cash transaction (Business Wire).

What this profile does not claim

This profile does not claim a birth date for Liu, a current equity stake or net worth, or any post-sale role or title: none is stated in the sources read in full, and the 10 percent stake is Liu’s 2018 statement, not a current figure. It does not smooth over the founding-year shorthand — work began in 2012, the company was founded in 2013, the public product launched in 2015 — and it does not repeat the secondary claim that Liu joined Bending Spoons’ board, which the completion release read in full does not state. It makes no claim about Liu’s private or family life, and it does not predict what Bending Spoons will do with Airtable’s product or workforce.