42. Airtable

Founders: Howie Liu (CEO), Andrew Ofstad, Emmett Nicholas
Launched: 2013
Headquarters: San Francisco
Funding: $1.3 billion
Valuation: $11 billion
Key technologies: Cloud computing, low code/no code software
Industry: Enterprise technology
Previous appearances on Disruptor 50 List: 3 (No. 33 in 2022)

The idea that anyone can build an online application for their role or team, far from where the software developers sit, has led to tremendous growth for a group of start-ups in the low-code/no-code space, none more prominent than Airtable.

An idea seemingly so simple – give workers at any desk the software to create their own apps, if not much more than custom-made spreadsheets – led by the end of 2021 to an $11 billion valuation for the company, and clients ranging from Levi's to Expedia, Shopify, Intuit, BlackRock, Penguin Random House and Spotify. In all, hundreds of thousands of organizations, including 80% of the Fortune 100.

But a lot has changed in a little over a year, including one very big tech innovation. 

As generative AI and ChatGPT from No. 1 2023 CNBC Disruptor company OpenAI quickly entered the market, workers don't have to worry about no-code or low-code – they can have the AI write the code for them. Airtable sees that as complement to its basic premise rather than as a threat, and sees this playing out already alongside the work its software is doing on behalf of companies.

One of its clients, IT consultant SHI International, recently explained in a case study that ChatGPT could write enough code in two minutes to save an executive 20 hours of work, then be integrated with Airtable, take on some of the writing of formulas and custom scripts within the Airtable platform, and accelerate the construction of apps at scale across its key use cases, from production to scheduling, resource allocation and supply chain.

The jury is still out on how big that AI integration becomes in the future of low-code, and in the meantime, the downturn in the tech economy has hit Airtable, and humbled it a bit as far as the lofty ambitions that not long ago seemed attainable. 

After it raised the massive round of capital in late 2021 that took it to the $11 billion valuation, CEO and co-founder Howie Liu told CNBC, "Almost every single knowledge worker could be a customer in the future. We're adding more seats across almost every company out there."

That turned out to be too many seats for a sector shifting from growth at any cost to a sharper focus on running lean and generating profits. Last December, Airtable laid off roughly 20% of its staff as it started in a "new direction," according to a blog post from the CEO.

Liu said the company was evolving from its roots "as a primarily bottoms-up adopted product serving teams at organizations of many sizes, to a company that is focused on bringing connected apps to large enterprises." 

The largest enterprises have for some time already generated the majority of Airtable's revenue, and grew over 100% from 2021 to 2022. It is also the segment of the market where Airtable is seeing more app building reaching the widest user base, covering not just individual teams but entire departments.

Liu, who once believed that when it came to grabbing more market share, Airtable could "successfully pursue all of them in parallel," says the current economic and market environment required a reassessment of that "breakneck pace."

Which is not to say that the no-code/low-code opportunity has stopped growing. Gartner recently estimated that even amid a spending downcycle in enterprise IT, the market for low-code will reach $26.9 billion in 2023, up roughly 20% year over year. But collaboration and productivity software is also a crowded niche, with Notion, No. 32 on the 2023 CNBC Disruptor list, as well as Asana, Smartsheet and Monday.com, and many others, offering a variety of similar services.

Meanwhile, Microsoft, Google and Amazon have been investing heavily in their proprietary low-code offerings for years as their own competition to gain more market share in the cloud across a full suite of software services intensifies.