Bending Spoons continues its trend of buying software companies that were once sought after for pennies on the dollar. This time the Italian company buys He looked for $1.36 billion in cash ($1.79 billion equity value), a sharp drop in the valuation of the once-popular workplace collaboration startup. which received a price tag of $17.5 billion at the end of 2021.
Founded in 2011 as a whiteboard tool called RealtimeBoard, Miro found great fortune during the COVID-19 pandemic, when companies shifted to remote work en masse and discovered that their employees wanted to replicate the experience of collaborating on a physical whiteboard.
Miro quickly capitalized on that momentum by creating a platform that could integrate with more than 250 applications and partnered with Atlassian, Cisco, Microsoft, and Zoom. The company also began allowing its users to create integrations with common tools and customize the base product to meet their needs. Today, it calls itself an “AI innovation workspace” that offers AI assistants for its whiteboard tools, AI workflows, prototyping tools, and AI connectors that pull context from various platforms like GitHub, Jira, and Slack.
By 2022, Miro had grown from five million to approximately 30 million users in just two years, and its paying customer base had expanded by 550%, factors that likely contributed to its immense valuation at the time.
By all indications, the company has continued to grow, although not at that dizzying pace. Today, Miro has more than four million paid users and 100 million total users. Bending Spoons said Miro now has about $600 million in annual recurring revenue, of which 90% comes from businesses and enterprises. The company also has about $435 million in net cash and is profitable.
Still, the 92% drop in Miro’s valuation is illustrative of how much software-as-a-service (SaaS) multiples have unraveled since their heyday in 2021. By 2022, the pandemic’s dying tailwinds stimulated Companies adjust spending by reducing duplicate applications and licenses. Miro, which competes with much better-funded rivals such as Canva, Figma and Microsoft in the workplace collaboration space, likely found itself sidelined when companies began favoring multi-product bundles over individual collaboration tools.
Miró, which had around 1,200 employees in 2022, eliminated jobs twice, laying off 119 employees in February 2023 and supposedly another 275 people in October 2024.
Bending Spoons, however, is probably happy to be able to snap up a company that has done quite well for a smidgen of its former, possibly inflated, value. In that sense, Miro is quite similar to Airtable, which was valued at more than $11 billion in the boom days of 2021, but sold to Bending Spoons for $1.28 billion last month.
The Italian serial acquirer of software companies appears to be exploiting a specific shift: large, recognizable SaaS companies that in 2021 were priced as if they had become software giants, but matured into slower-growing but still substantial businesses with decent recurring revenue and established user bases.
Still, it’s curious why Miro’s board and investors agreed to sell at that price now, especially considering the company apparently didn’t need the cash. Has confidence in SaaS companies being able to go public or find a comparable exit plummeted so low?
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