Bending Spoons to buy Miro for $1.36B, far below its pandemic-era peak

Bending Spoons agrees to acquire Miro

Bending Spoons has entered a definitive agreement to buy Miro, the online whiteboard and collaboration platform, at an enterprise value of $1.355 billion in an all-cash transaction. Including Miro's net cash, the equity value works out to roughly $1.79 billion, according to the company's announcement. Both boards unanimously approved the deal, which is expected to close in the fourth quarter of 2026 pending regulatory approvals.

As part of the arrangement, certain Miro shareholders will plough $295 million of their proceeds into newly issued Bending Spoons equity — a signal that at least some of the startup's investors see more upside in the acquirer than in holding out for an independent exit.

A steep valuation reset

According to TechCrunch, Miro carried a $17.5 billion price tag in late 2021 at the height of the remote-work boom, which makes the current price a drop of roughly 90%. TechCrunch attributes the collapse to the broader unwind in SaaS multiples since then: pandemic tailwinds faded, corporate buyers trimmed duplicate app licences, and preferences shifted toward product suites rather than single-purpose collaboration tools, leaving Miro to compete against better-funded rivals such as Canva, Figma and Microsoft.

The company was not immune to the slowdown. TechCrunch reports that Miro laid off 119 employees in February 2023 and reportedly another 275 in October 2024.

What Bending Spoons is getting

By the numbers, Miro remains a substantial business. According to the announcement, it generates around $600 million in annual recurring revenue, nearly 90% of it from business and enterprise customers, with more than 750 customers paying over $100,000 a year. Roughly 4 million of its 100 million users pay for the product, and over 250,000 organisations have built it into their workflows. TechCrunch, citing Bending Spoons, adds that Miro holds about $435 million in net cash and is profitable.

Miro's chief executive and co-founder Andrey Khusid described the product as an "AI-first workspace", and TechCrunch notes it now offers AI assistants, AI workflows, prototyping tools and connectors that pull context from platforms such as GitHub, Jira and Slack. Bending Spoons CEO Luca Ferrari called it "a privilege, and no small responsibility" to take on a product with that footprint, and said the plan after closing is to invest substantially in performance, reliability and the functionality that supports critical collaborative work.

A repeat of the Airtable play

The Miro deal closely mirrors Bending Spoons' purchase of Airtable, which the announcement says was completed last week. TechCrunch notes that Airtable was valued at more than $11 billion in 2021 and sold for $1.28 billion — the same pattern of buying mature, slower-growing but cash-generating SaaS businesses for a fraction of their boom-era prices.

Bending Spoons' stated model is to acquire digital businesses, apply deep operational transformations and hold them for the long term; it says it has never sold a material business in more than a decade of executing this strategy. Its portfolio now includes AOL, Brightcove, Eventbrite, Evernote, Tractive, Vimeo, WeTransfer and Airtable, with Miro set to join them once the deal clears.

Why it matters

The price is the story. A profitable company with $600 million in annual recurring revenue and four million paying users selling for roughly a tenth of its peak valuation says a great deal about how the market now prices established SaaS businesses — and, as TechCrunch observes, about how far confidence in IPOs or comparable exits for such companies has fallen, given that Miro apparently did not need the cash.

For collaboration software specifically, this is a clear consolidation signal: standalone tools are being absorbed into larger portfolios rather than charting independent paths, and Bending Spoons is positioning itself as the consolidator of choice. What it means for Miro's users is less certain. The acquirer is candid that its transformations typically involve reorganising teams, overhauling technology, redesigning interfaces and accelerating monetisation — deep changes that will now be applied to a product that, by its own numbers, plenty of teams already rely on daily.