Bending Spoons, the Italian company specializing in acquiring software companies, announced an agreement to buy enterprise collaboration platform Miro for $1.36 billion in cash, or $1.79 billion based on equity value. The deal represents a sharp decline from Miro’s $17.5 billion valuation in late 2021—an approximately 92% decrease, according to the figures cited in the report.
The deal does not necessarily appear to be an acquisition of a distressed company. Bending Spoons said Miro generates approximately $600 million in annual recurring revenue, 90% of which comes from companies and enterprises. It also has approximately $435 million in net cash and is profitable. However, its current growth no longer matches the exceptional pace it recorded during the peak of remote work.
A platform that flourished with remote work
Miro was founded in 2011 under the name RealtimeBoard as a digital whiteboard tool. The platform gained significant momentum during the COVID-19 pandemic, when companies needed to simulate collaboration around a physical whiteboard as employees shifted to remote work. Over two years, its user count rose from 5 million to approximately 30 million by 2022, while its paid customer base grew by 550%.
Miro expanded the product’s scope through integration with more than 250 applications and by building partnerships with Atlassian, Cisco, Microsoft and Zoom. The platform currently presents itself as an “AI innovation workspace,” with assistants and tools for workflows and prototyping, as well as connectors that extract context from services such as GitHub, Jira and Slack.
The company says it now has more than 100 million users, including more than 4 million paid users. These figures indicate that the decline in market value does not mean demand for the product has disappeared, but rather reflects a change in how software companies and their growth are valued.
What does the deal reveal about the SaaS market?
The report links the sharp decline in Miro’s valuation to the contraction in software-as-a-service company multiples after the 2021 boom. As the remote-work boost ended, companies began cutting spending and eliminating recurring applications and licenses, while also favoring integrated software suites over purchasing separate tools. In this market, Miro faces well-funded competitors such as Canva, Figma and Microsoft.
This coincided with workforce reductions: Miro laid off 119 employees in February 2023, and reports said another 275 positions were eliminated in October 2024. The source does not establish that these cuts caused the deal, but they illustrate the pressures the company faced after its rapid expansion phase.
A recurring acquisition model
The deal is part of Bending Spoons’ strategy of buying well-known software companies at prices far below their previous valuations. This resembles its acquisition of Airtable for $1.28 billion the previous month, after the company’s valuation exceeded $11 billion during the 2021 boom.
The most important takeaway is that value has shifted from expectations of future growth toward recurring revenue, profitability and operational viability. Nevertheless, the agreement leaves an open question: why did Miro’s board and investors agree to sell at this price despite the company having liquidity and profitability, and how much have the prospects for public SaaS offerings or comparable exits declined? The source does not provide a definitive answer to this decision.