Bending Spoons has agreed to buy visual collaboration company Miro for $1.36 billion in cash, valuing the equity at $1.79 billion. The proposed deal is striking less for the product category than for the contrast with Miro’s last peak valuation: $17.5 billion in late 2021.
The transaction puts a roughly 90% reduction on the value assigned during the pandemic-era software boom. But it also illustrates a more nuanced reality for mature SaaS companies: a lower valuation does not necessarily mean a distressed business.
A valuable business at a very different price
Miro grew rapidly as remote work made digital whiteboarding a standard part of product, design and planning workflows. It expanded from roughly 5 million users to about 30 million in two years by 2022, according to prior company reporting.
Today, Bending Spoons says Miro has more than 100 million users, including more than 4 million paying users. It reports about $600 million in annual recurring revenue, with 90% coming from businesses and enterprises. The company is profitable and has approximately $435 million in net cash.
Those figures make Miro materially different from a typical turnaround target. The acquisition is better understood as a repricing of a recognized software platform whose growth profile and strategic position no longer support its 2021-era expectations.
The distinction matters for operators evaluating vendors or building software businesses. Recurring revenue, enterprise penetration and cash generation can sustain a company through a market reset. They do not, by themselves, preserve venture-era valuation multiples.
Why the collaboration category got harder
Miro’s original strength was a focused product that made distributed collaboration easier. It subsequently broadened into what it calls an AI innovation workspace, adding AI assistants, workflows, prototyping features and connectors for systems including GitHub, Jira and Slack.
Yet collaboration has become increasingly bundled. Buyers can obtain adjacent capabilities from broader platforms and suites, while Miro faces well-funded competitors including Microsoft, Canva and Figma. When enterprises rationalize application portfolios, standalone tools must demonstrate a clear advantage over functions available elsewhere in the stack.
Miro also adjusted its cost base after the boom, cutting 119 roles in February 2023 and reportedly another 275 in October 2024. That history reflects the wider transition from pandemic-driven seat expansion to tighter scrutiny of licenses, overlapping products and ROI.
Bending Spoons is building a specific acquisition playbook
The Miro deal follows Bending Spoons’ announced acquisition of Airtable for $1.28 billion. Airtable had also commanded a valuation above $11 billion during the 2021 boom.
The pattern is clear: acquire established software brands with large user bases, recurring revenue and products that remain operationally important, but whose likely public-market or strategic exit value has declined sharply. For Bending Spoons, the opportunity is to apply centralized ownership and operational discipline to businesses that may no longer fit the growth assumptions of their original investors.
For founders and boards, the lesson is uncomfortable but practical. A company can be profitable, well-capitalized and meaningful to customers while still facing a constrained exit market. The relevant comparison is no longer the last financing round; it is the value a buyer assigns to durable cash flows, competitive differentiation and future growth.
What to watch next
The key questions now are whether Bending Spoons preserves Miro’s product momentum and enterprise relationships, and how aggressively it integrates operations. Customers should watch for changes to product packaging, AI-roadmap priorities, support and integration commitments.
More broadly, expect similar transactions where high-quality SaaS companies have durable revenue but slower growth, crowded categories or valuations anchored to a market that no longer exists.
