Bending Spoons buys Miro for $1.36B, a 90% cut from 2022

Bending Spoons is continuing its trend of buying once-sought-after software companies for pennies on the dollar. The Italian company is buying workplace-collaboration startup Miro for $1.36 billion in cash (an equity value of $1.79 billion), a steep drop from the $17.5 billion price tag Miro commanded in late 2021.

Founded in 2011 as a whiteboarding tool called RealtimeBoard, Miro found major traction during the COVID-19 pandemic, as companies moved to remote work en masse and looked to replicate the experience of collaborating on a physical whiteboard.

Miro capitalized on that momentum by building a platform that integrates with more than 250 apps and striking partnerships with Atlassian, Cisco, Microsoft, and Zoom. It also let users build their own integrations and customize the base product. Today it calls itself an “AI innovation workspace,” offering AI assistants for its whiteboard tools, AI workflows, prototyping tools, and AI connectors that pull context from platforms like GitHub, Jira, and Slack.

By 2022, Miro had grown from 5 million to about 30 million users within two years, and its paying customer base had expanded by 550% — factors that likely contributed to its outsized valuation at the time. The company has kept growing since, though not at that pace: it now has more than 4 million paying users and 100 million total users. Bending Spoons said Miro has about $600 million in annual recurring revenue, 90% of it from businesses and enterprises, along with about $435 million in net cash, and the company is profitable.

Still, the 92% dip in Miro’s valuation illustrates how far software-as-a-service multiples have unwound since their 2021 peak. By 2022, fading pandemic tailwinds pushed companies to tighten spending by cutting duplicate apps and licenses. Miro, competing against much-better-funded rivals such as Canva, Figma, and Microsoft in workplace collaboration, likely got squeezed as businesses shifted toward bundled suites instead of standalone tools. The company, which had about 1,200 employees in 2022, cut jobs twice — laying off 119 staff in February 2023 and reportedly another 275 people in October 2024.

Bending Spoons is likely pleased to pick up a company that has kept performing well for a fraction of its former, arguably inflated, valuation. In that sense, Miro resembles Airtable, which was valued at more than $11 billion during the 2021 boom but sold to Bending Spoons for $1.28 billion last month. The Italian serial acquirer appears to be exploiting a specific pattern: large, recognizable SaaS companies priced in 2021 as if they’d become software giants, but which matured into slower-growing, still-substantial businesses with solid recurring revenue and established user bases.

Why it matters

Miro’s sale, coming a month after Airtable’s, suggests Bending Spoons has found a repeatable playbook for buying mature, profitable SaaS companies that overshot their 2021-era valuations — and raises the question of whether other once-hot collaboration startups could be next.