Miro Sells to Bending Spoons for $1.4 Billion, Down From $17.5 Billion Valuation in 2022

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Italian software group Bending Spoons is continuing its shopping spree, and this time it has landed one of the best-known names in collaboration software: Miro. The company announced just now that it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire the whiteboard platform at an enterprise value of $1.355 billion in an all-cash transaction. Adding Miro’s net cash, the deal implies an equity value of roughly $1.79 billion. Part of the purchase price flows straight back: certain Miro shareholders have agreed to invest $295 million of their proceeds into newly issued Bending Spoons equity. Closing remains subject to customary conditions, including regulatory approvals.

It is the second billion-dollar deal for Bending Spoons within a matter of weeks. The acquisition of Airtable closed only recently, another Silicon Valley darling of the zero-interest-rate era.

From $17.5 Billion to $1.355 Billion

The real story of this deal sits in the gap between those two numbers. In early 2022, at the height of the tech boom, Miro raised a $400 million Series C led by Iconiq Growth at a valuation of $17.5 billion. Back then the company talked about more than 50 million users and around 1,800 employees, and remote work looked like a permanent condition that would turn digital whiteboards into core infrastructure.

The price being paid today amounts to less than 8 percent of that valuation. Miro is changing hands for a fraction of what investors ascribed to it four years ago. The path there ran through the return to the office, through a wave of new AI tools that handle brainstorming and diagramming almost as a side effect, and through competition from Figma, Canva and the collaboration features baked into the big platforms. Miro already cut roughly 18 percent of its workforce in 2024.

Operationally, the business remains solid. Bending Spoons cites annual recurring revenue of around $600 million, with nearly 90 percent coming from business and enterprise customers. About 250,000 organizations use the product, close to 4 million paying users are on board, and more than 750 customers each generate over $100,000 in annual recurring revenue. That puts the purchase price at roughly 2.3 times recurring revenue, a multiple that in better years was reserved for stagnating legacy vendors rather than a brand with 15 years of product history.

“It’s a privilege, and no small responsibility, to welcome a product that over 250,000 organizations have integrated into their workflows,” said Luca Ferrari, CEO and co-founder of Bending Spoons. After closing, he said, the company plans to invest substantially in performance, reliability and functionality, and intends to own and operate Miro for the long term. Miro founder and CEO Andrey Khusid described the product as an “AI-first workspace” and said the best version of Miro is still ahead.

The Strategy: Buy Software, Cut Costs, Harvest Cash

Bending Spoons stopped being an app developer long ago. It now operates as an acquisition machine for digital brands with loyal user bases and weak growth stories. The portfolio includes Evernote, Meetup, WeTransfer, Vimeo, Brightcove, StreamYard, AOL, Komoot and Austrian scale-up Tractive. The pattern repeats itself: buy a product with millions of users that has lost its valuation narrative, then adjust pricing, rebuild the subscription model and take a radical knife to costs.

Automation is the central lever. Bending Spoons runs its own software layer with in-house tools called Minerva, Juno, Xina, Matrix and Galf, which handle marketing, UX optimization, payments and analytics across the entire portfolio with minimal headcount. That is where the math comes from: work that used to occupy whole departments continues with a fraction of the staff, and the freed-up cash flow funds the next acquisition.

Since its Nasdaq listing, which raised $1.68 billion, that model has been publicly funded. Market capitalization climbed to around $25.7 billion afterwards, more than double the last private valuation of $11 billion. The most recent quarter brought $601 million in revenue and net income of $27.4 million, a turnaround from a net loss of $112 million a year earlier. With public market capital behind it, the company can aim at far bigger targets, and Miro and Airtable in quick succession are the proof.

Why Austria Is Watching Closely

Austria has already seen how a chapter like this can end, at pet-tracking company Tractive. Bending Spoons paid 770 million euros for the Pasching-based business, celebrated at the time as one of the largest exits in Austrian startup history. Weeks after closing came the announcement that roughly 160 of about 300 positions would be cut, more than half the workforce. Founder Michael Hurnaus left the company. The cuts were justified by the need for a “lean organization” to preserve “long-term flexibility and focus.”

At hiking and cycling app Komoot the cut went deeper still, with around 85 percent of staff losing their jobs. At Airtable, which employs roughly 1,400 people, neither side has commented on headcount plans. Miro employs staff in the four-digit range, and the announcement offers no assurances on that front. Anyone who has read the earlier chapters will read the pledge to invest in “performance, reliability and functionality” for what it is: a promise about the product, with the size of the team behind it left open.

The Airtable Comparison Shows the Pattern

Airtable is the clearest blueprint for what is now happening to Miro. The San Francisco database platform was valued at $11.7 billion in its 2021 Series F, raised roughly $1.4 billion in total capital, and was recently acquired at an enterprise value of $1.285 billion. The ingredients were the same: a product with deep enterprise adoption, a valuation minted in the zero-interest-rate era, growth that stopped meeting expectations, and finally a buyer who pays for predictable subscription revenue rather than for the story.

For European founders and investors there are two lessons here. First, the valuations of 2021 and 2022 are permanently gone in many cases, and the way out now runs through a heavily discounted sale rather than an IPO. Second, the consolidator this time sits in Milan rather than California: Bending Spoons is buying American tech brands at prices that would have been unthinkable a few years ago and assembling them into a European software group with billions in revenue. Whether that counts as good news for the teams involved should become clear at Miro over the coming months.