Bending Spoons has reached an agreement to acquire Miro, a visual collaboration and digital whiteboard platform that emerged during the remote work era, in a $1.36 billion all-cash deal. The indicated equity value for the company is $1.79 billion. For the Italian company, it marks another major acquisition in international software; for Miro, however, the price reflects a clear departure from the era when the market awarded far more ambitious multiples to SaaS platforms boosted by the pandemic.
At the end of 2021, Miro was valued at $17.5 billion. Comparing that figure with the current transaction implies a drop of more than 90%, although it involves two points in time and financial metrics that are not perfectly comparable. The figure remains significant, however: in just a few years, one of the most representative remote collaboration companies went from the status of a unicorn valued at tens of billions to a sale whose price is much closer to operational fundamentals than to the expansion expectations of the pandemic era.
The Miro case thus tells two stories at once. On one hand, there is Bending Spoons, an Italian group that continues to build a portfolio of globally recognized software. On the other, there is the new equilibrium in the SaaS sector: businesses with recurring revenue, enterprise customers, and substantial user bases can remain solid and profitable companies, but that does not mean they retain the private valuations granted during the years of abundant capital and extraordinary growth.
From RealtimeBoard to a platform for distributed teams
Miro was founded in 2011 under the name RealtimeBoard. Initially, the product was a shared online whiteboard designed to allow multiple people to work within the same visual space. The leap in scale came when remote work ceased to be an organizational niche and became the norm for many enterprises. Physical meetings, sticky notes, and conference room whiteboards had to find a digital equivalent accessible from different locations.
In that context, Miro tapped into broad demand: workshops, project planning, brainstorming, design thinking, training sessions, and cross-departmental collaboration. The company expanded the product with integrations for more than 250 applications and partnerships with Atlassian, Cisco, Microsoft, and Zoom. It also opened up to customization, allowing users to connect common tools and adapt the workspace to their own workflows.
Growth was rapid. Between 2020 and 2022, the user base surged from 5 million to around 30 million, while the number of paying customers increased by 550%. These figures help explain the valuation reached in 2021, at a time when investors and the market were betting on the persistence of habits adopted during the health crisis and on the ability of vertical platforms to become core infrastructure for businesses.
Today, Miro describes itself as an “AI innovation workspace.” Alongside digital whiteboards, it offers AI-powered assistants, workflows, and prototyping tools, as well as connectors capable of pulling context from platforms such as GitHub, Jira, and Slack. The decision to position itself as a broader workspace responds to a market where a simple collaborative whiteboard risks becoming a feature bundled into larger suites, rather than a standalone product.
Revenue and users did not prevent the price drop
The sale is not coming from a company lacking traction. According to figures shared by Bending Spoons, Miro has over 100 million total users and more than 4 million paying users. Annual recurring revenue stands at around $600 million, with 90% coming from business and enterprise clients. The company is also reportedly profitable, with approximately $435 million in net cash.
These elements reframe the deal. It does not look like the acquisition of a marginal product or a platform seeking immediate liquidity, but rather that of a mature business with a recognizable brand, a professional customer base, and a subscription-based model. These are precisely the traits that appeal to a buyer accustomed to managing digital products on an international scale.
However, Miro’s valuation has shifted because the way the market values subscription software growth has changed. With the exceptional surge in remote work over, many companies have reined in spending on overlapping tools, consolidating licenses and favoring ecosystems already adopted internally. In parallel, competition has grown more complex. Miro operates in a space where Canva, Figma, and Microsoft are also active, with different yet partially overlapping offerings.
The presence of large suites can affect a specialized platform’s ability to rapidly expand customer value. For IT leaders, convenience and value do not depend solely on the quality of a tool: access management, security, integration with existing workflows, and the total cost of licensing all carry weight. In a period of rationalization, an excellent product can hit a wall simply because an alternative is already included in a broader enterprise agreement.
Miro has also weathered two rounds of layoffs following the pandemic peak. In February 2023, it laid off 119 people; in October 2024, an additional cut of around 275 employees was reported. In 2022, the company had roughly 1,200 staff. While reorganizations do not tell the whole story of a business's health, they place the sale within a phase of adaptation to growth rates far less exceptional than those posted in the preceding two-year stretch.
The Bending Spoons model and the Airtable precedent
For Bending Spoons, Miro aligns with an increasingly recognizable strategy: identify software products with strong brand awareness, loyal user bases, and recurring revenue, acquire them, and integrate them into a broader operational structure. The Italian group is not chasing early-stage startup narratives; it is targeting companies that have already passed the market test, but are trading at prices far below their 2021 private valuations.
The most direct comparison is Airtable, acquired by Bending Spoons last month for $1.28 billion after climbing to a valuation of more than $11 billion in the 2021 market cycle. Miro and Airtable do not offer the same product, but they share a significant profile: widely used software, also geared toward enterprises and backed by recurring revenue, that had to reckon with a drastic normalization of valuation multiples.
The difference between valuations back then and current acquisition prices does not necessarily imply that the businesses were “wrong.” Private valuations factor in projections: future growth, margin expansion potential, the prospect of an IPO, or an exit at an even higher price. When the cost of capital rises, corporate spending slows, and growth fails to keep pace with expectations, those forecasts are recalibrated. This is clearly evident across the SaaS sector following its 2021 peak.
For Bending Spoons, the challenge now lies in translating Miro’s scale into sustainable results without diluting what made the product valuable to teams in the first place: ease of adoption, robust integrations, and the ability to collaborate cross-functionally across design, development, product, and business. A user base of over 4 million paying users is a major asset, but one that demands continuity in service reliability, security, and product evolution.
What to watch after the deal
The transaction will be worth monitoring on at least three fronts. The first involves the product: Miro has been investing in AI capabilities and integrations with everyday workflow tools, and it will be critical to see whether Bending Spoons accelerates this trajectory or streamlines priorities. The second concerns enterprise customers, who account for 90% of reported annual recurring revenue: for these clients, stability, contracts, data governance, and the technology roadmap are paramount.
The third front is the broader market landscape. If acquisitions like Airtable and Miro continue to multiply, the sector could enter a new phase of consolidation. Software companies built during the boom are not necessarily in distress, but some may find M&A to be a more practical route than an IPO to deliver liquidity to investors and employees. Bending Spoons is positioning itself as one of the most active buyers in this shift, with Miro representing one of its most high-profile deals to date.
