Software Stocks Told Two Completely Different Stories in One Week
Keypoints:
- Bending Spoons bought Airtable for under $1.3 billion, down from a $12 billion peak valuation in 2021
- HubSpot fell 19% on Thursday, its worst single trading day in a decade
- Datadog dropped 19% the same day, its steepest slide since its 2019 IPO
- Twilio and Atlassian both surged more than 20% on Friday
- 86% of all private software deal value in the first half of 2026 went to AI companies, not traditional SaaS
Bending Spoons, the Italian firm already behind AOL, Evernote, and Vimeo, agreed to buy once-$12-billion Airtable for under $1.3 billion. That's roughly a 90% haircut from its 2021 peak, and it's worth pausing on what that number actually represents.
Airtable wasn't a struggling company nobody wanted, it was a genuine category leader in workflow software just five years ago. The price tells you how fast the ground has shifted underneath tools like it.
Two days later, HubSpot posted its worst single trading day in ten years, sliding 19%, and Datadog fell the same amount, its steepest drop since going public in 2019. RBC analyst Matt Hedberg named the mechanism driving both moves directly.
Companies are increasingly using AI coding agents to build their own internal functionality instead of buying it, which quietly squeezes renewal pricing on tools they used to pay full price for without a second thought. That's a slower, less dramatic threat than a competitor stealing customers, but arguably a more permanent one, since it changes what a customer is even willing to pay for in the first place.
Then Friday flipped the script entirely. Twilio and Atlassian both surged more than 20% on strong quarterly results, real proof that software isn't dying so much as splitting hard into clear winners and losers. The venture funding data backs up just how lopsided that split has already become.
86% of all private software deal value in the first half of 2026 went straight to AI companies, leaving traditional SaaS startups fighting over what little capital is left. The takeaway isn't that software is over. It's that "software company" stopped being a safe enough category on its own to guarantee investor confidence.