Miro sells for $1.36bn, 92% below its 2021 price

Bending Spoons has agreed to buy Miro for $1.36bn in cash, against an equity value of $1.79bn. The workplace collaboration company was valued at $17.5bn in late 2021.

That is a 92% fall from peak to exit.

Miro started in 2011 as a whiteboarding tool called RealtimeBoard. Remote working during the pandemic did the rest.

Users went from 5 million to about 30 million in two years, and the paying base grew by 550% over the same stretch, which is roughly what a $17.5bn price tag was bought on.

The product widened accordingly: integrations with more than 250 apps, and partnerships with Atlassian, Cisco, Microsoft and Zoom. It now describes itself as an AI workspace, with assistants, workflows and connectors pulling context from GitHub, Jira and Slack.

The business today is larger than it was, just slower. Miro has more than 4 million paying users and 100 million users in total.

Bending Spoons says Miro has about $600m in annual recurring revenue, 90% of it from businesses and enterprises, about $435m in net cash, and is profitable.

So this is not a distressed sale of a failing company. It is a repricing of the multiple attached to a working one.

The intervening years were not painless. Miro had about 1,200 staff in 2022, cut 119 jobs in February 2023, and reportedly cut a further 275 in October 2024, while competing with Canva, Figma and Microsoft as corporate buyers consolidated licences into suites.

Bending Spoons has done this before, and recently. It bought Airtable last month for $1.28bn; Airtable was valued at more than $11bn in 2021.

The pattern is legible enough. Companies priced in 2021 as future giants have matured into solid mid-sized software businesses with real recurring revenue, and someone is buying the gap between the two descriptions.

For founders, the number that matters is not $17.5bn but $600m of ARR and what a buyer will pay for it. A paper valuation set in 2021 is a strike price for employee options, and staff who joined at that mark are looking at an exit nine-tenths below it.

The harder question is why a profitable company sitting on $435m of net cash agreed to sell now. Miro's board and investors have not set out their reasoning.

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