Bending Spoons has agreed to acquire workplace collaboration company Miro for $1.36 billion in cash, an equity value of $1.79 billion. The deal marks a steep decline for a company that carried a $17.5 billion valuation in late 2021. The Italian software acquirer is continuing a pattern of buying established software companies at prices well below their boom-era highs.
Miro launched in 2011 as a whiteboarding tool called RealtimeBoard. It grew rapidly during the COVID-19 pandemic, when companies shifted to remote work and sought to recreate the experience of collaborating on a physical whiteboard. The company built a platform that integrates with more than 250 apps and formed partnerships with Atlassian, Cisco, Microsoft, and Zoom. It also allowed users to build their own integrations and customize the base product.
Miro now describes itself as an AI innovation workspace, offering AI assistants for its whiteboarding tools, AI workflows, prototyping tools, and AI connectors that pull context from platforms including GitHub, Jira, and Slack. Between 2022 and the prior two years, its user base grew from 5 million to about 30 million, and its paying customer base expanded by 550%. Today, Miro reports 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 which comes from businesses and enterprises, along with roughly $435 million in net cash, and that the company is profitable.
The 92% drop in Miro's valuation reflects how far software-as-a-service multiples have fallen since 2021. By 2022, fading pandemic tailwinds pushed companies to cut spending on duplicate apps and licenses. Miro faced competition from better-funded rivals including Canva, Figma, and Microsoft, as businesses increasingly favored suites of products over individual collaboration tools. Miro had about 1,200 employees in 2022 and cut jobs twice, laying off 119 staff in February 2023 and reportedly another 275 people in October 2024.
Miro resembles Airtable, which was valued at over $11 billion in 2021 and sold to Bending Spoons for $1.28 billion last month. The Italian acquirer appears to be targeting large, recognizable SaaS companies that were priced as future software giants but matured into slower-growing businesses with substantial recurring revenue and established user bases. It remains unclear why Miro's board and investors agreed to sell at that price, particularly since the company did not appear to need the cash, raising questions about confidence in SaaS companies reaching public markets or finding comparable exits.
More company and startup news from TechManNews.
