Miro

Overview

Miro is the online-whiteboard company that became the pandemic era’s shared workspace — and then its valuation cautionary tale. Founded in 2011 as RealtimeBoard by Andrey Khusid and Oleg Shardin, and co-headquartered in San Francisco and Amsterdam, it grew from 5 million to 30 million users during the remote-work boom, raised $400 million in January 2022 at a $17.5 billion valuation, and was sold to the Italian serial acquirer Bending Spoons in 2026 for $1.36 billion in cash (TechCrunch; Reworked). The striking part of the sale is not that Miro failed — at the time of the deal it was profitable, held about $435 million in net cash, and generated roughly $600 million in annual recurring revenue, 90% of it from businesses and enterprises (TechCrunch). The market simply stopped paying 2021 prices for that kind of business.

From RealtimeBoard to the pandemic boom

Miro began as a tool for a narrow, concrete problem: letting distributed teams share ideas the way they would around a physical whiteboard. Founded in 2011 as RealtimeBoard by Khusid and Shardin, it rebranded as Miro in 2019 as its ambitions widened from whiteboarding to visual collaboration generally (Reworked; VentureBeat). The product is an infinite canvas on which teams run workshops and meetings, design products, brainstorm ideas, and map processes, with users able to build their own integrations and customize the base product (TechCrunch; VentureBeat).

The pandemic did the rest. As companies moved to remote work en masse, employees wanted to replicate the experience of collaborating on a physical whiteboard, and Miro capitalized by building a platform that integrated with more than 250 apps and struck partnerships with Atlassian, Cisco, Microsoft, and Zoom (TechCrunch). Between April 2020 and January 2022 its user count rose from 5 million to 30 million and its paying customer base from 20,000 to 130,000, and the company claimed 99% of the Fortune 100 as customers (Reworked; VentureBeat). The January 2022 Series C — $400 million led by ICONIQ Growth with Accel, Atlassian, Dragoneer, GIC, Salesforce Ventures and TCV, bringing total funding to $476 million — priced the company at $17.5 billion (Reworked). By 2022 it employed about 1,200 people and was pitching itself beyond the whiteboard: 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 (TechCrunch).

The unwind: growing, but no longer at boom speed

What followed was not a collapse but a comedown. As pandemic tailwinds faded, companies tightened spending by cutting duplicate apps and licenses, and Miro — competing with much better-funded rivals such as Canva, Figma, and Microsoft in workplace collaboration — found businesses preferring suites of products over individual collaboration tools (TechCrunch). The company cut jobs twice: 119 staff in February 2023 and about 275 people in October 2024, the latter described by PitchBook as more than 15% of its workforce (TechCrunch; PitchBook). Yet growth continued, just not at the blistering pace of 2020–2022: by the time of the sale, Miro counted more than 4 million paying users and 100 million users in total (TechCrunch).

That combination — a large, paying, profitable user base attached to a deflated valuation — is what makes Miro the cleanest marker of the SaaS multiple unwind. The table below separates the three price measures that news coverage often blurs together:

Measure	Figure	Fall from the $17.5B peak
Enterprise value at sale	$1.355 billion	~92%
Cash price	$1.36 billion	~92%
Equity value (incl. net cash)	$1.79 billion	~90%

At $1.355 billion against roughly $600 million in annual recurring revenue, the deal priced Miro at about 2.3 times ARR — arithmetic on reported figures, not a stated deal metric. The implication TechCrunch drew is blunt: companies priced in 2021 as if they would become software giants matured into slower-growing but substantial businesses, and buyers now pay for dependable revenue rather than for years of expected growth (TechCrunch). TechCrunch also noted the open question: given Miro did not apparently need the cash, why its board and investors agreed to sell at that price now — and whether confidence in a public listing or comparable exit for such companies has fallen that far (TechCrunch).

The Bending Spoons deal

Miro was Bending Spoons’ second big workplace deal in weeks. The Italian acquirer, continuing its pattern of buying once-sought-after software companies for a fraction of their former valuations, had agreed the previous month to buy Airtable — valued at over $11 billion in 2021 — for $1.28 billion (TechCrunch). The Miro agreement followed on 10 September 2026 at $1.36 billion in cash, an enterprise value of $1.355 billion and an equity value of $1.79 billion once Miro’s net cash was counted (TechCrunch). Bending Spoons completed the acquisition on 26 October 2026, acquiring 100% of Miro’s shares in an all-cash transaction; at closing, certain former Miro shareholders reinvested about $295 million of their proceeds into roughly 6.2 million newly issued Bending Spoons shares (Business Wire). Bending Spoons’ chief executive Luca Ferrari said Miro had “built a strong business around a product that makes complex collaborative work feel simple,” while Miro’s Khusid described Bending Spoons as “an owner who invests for the long term and cares deeply about product quality” (Business Wire). The completion release lists Miro alongside Airtable among Bending Spoons’ main businesses (Business Wire).

What this profile does not claim

This profile does not claim Miro was failing when it was sold: the cited sources describe it as profitable, cash-rich, and still growing, and the sale price is presented as a repricing of SaaS multiples, not evidence of distress. It does not state a single “90%” or “92%” fall without the measure behind it, since the enterprise-value fall (~92%) and the equity-value fall (~90%) differ. It does not assert a percentage for the October 2024 layoff, since sources disagree on the denominator, and it does not repeat the company’s 99%-of-the-Fortune-100 claim as an independently verified fact. It does not predict what Bending Spoons will change about Miro — no post-acquisition product, pricing, or staffing plan for Miro has been reported in the sources read for this profile.