Bending Spoons agrees to acquire Miro in $1.36bn cash deal
Bending Spoons has agreed to acquire workplace collaboration company Miro for $1.36 billion in cash, with an equity value of $1.79 billion. The proposed purchase places a sharply lower value on the company than the $17.5 billion valuation it received in late 2021, when remote-work demand propelled digital whiteboarding and collaboration services.
Miro, founded in 2011 as RealtimeBoard, has evolved from a whiteboarding tool into what it calls an AI innovation workspace. Its offering includes AI assistants for whiteboards, AI workflows, prototyping tools and connectors that can pull context from GitHub, Jira and Slack.
A substantial business at a lower price
Bending Spoons said Miro has more than 100 million total users and more than four million paying users. It reported about $600 million in annual recurring revenue, with businesses and enterprises accounting for 90% of that total. Miro is profitable and has approximately $435 million in net cash.
Those figures show that the transaction is not a purchase of a distressed company. Instead, it puts a price on a mature SaaS business whose growth profile and market valuation have changed considerably since the pandemic-era software boom.
During the rapid shift to remote work, Miro expanded from five million to around 30 million users in two years. Its paying customer base grew by 550% by 2022. The platform also built integrations with more than 250 applications and formed partnerships with Atlassian, Cisco, Microsoft and Zoom, while allowing customers to create integrations and tailor the product.
SaaS multiples and consolidation
The gap between Miro's late-2021 valuation and the current deal illustrates the unwinding of SaaS multiples after their 2021 peak. As pandemic tailwinds faded, organisations reduced spending on duplicate applications and licences. In workplace collaboration, Miro also faced competition from Canva, Figma and Microsoft, as buyers increasingly selected broader suites rather than standalone tools.
Miro reduced its workforce twice after its earlier expansion, laying off 119 employees in February 2023 and reportedly another 275 in October 2024. It had about 1,200 employees in 2022.
The acquisition follows Bending Spoons' agreement last month to buy Airtable for $1.28 billion, after Airtable had been valued at more than $11 billion in 2021. The buyer's acquisition approach is also part of the expansion described by Bending Spoons builds a digital portfolio through deals as the company builds a digital portfolio through deals, AI and operational discipline.
What procurement teams can take from the deal
For business technology leaders, Miro's figures underline the need to separate the usefulness of a product from the valuation attached to its vendor. A profitable platform with recurring enterprise revenue, a large user base and broad integrations can remain strategically relevant even when public and private market expectations for standalone SaaS companies have reset.
Procurement and IT teams can therefore assess collaboration software through adoption, integration coverage, recurring costs and overlap with existing suites, while treating vendor valuation as only one part of a longer-term platform decision.