Bending Spoons buys Miro for $1.355 billion, and the buyer's track record raises a flag

# Bending Spoons buys Miro for $1.355 billion, and the buyer's track record raises a flag

Owner of Evernote, WeTransfer, and Airtable acquires the whiteboard platform used by design and product teams in Brazil. What changes depends on how the Italian company usually runs its acquisitions.

Editor's note: this text mentions, in passing, that Adobe abandoned its acquisition of Figma in December 2023 due to regulatory hurdles, when citing FigJam as an alternative to Miro. This information does not appear in Bending Spoons' announcement, the only source used in reporting this story, and could not be verified against it. The rest of the data in this piece (figures, ARR, users, quotes, and Bending Spoons' history) was confirmed from the official source.

Bending Spoons, the Italian holding company listed on the Nasdaq, signed a definitive agreement to buy Miro for an enterprise value of $1.355 billion, according to the buyer's official announcement. Accounting for Miro's net cash, the equity value reaches about $1.79 billion. The deal is all-cash, with closing expected in the fourth quarter of 2026, subject to regulatory approvals. Until then, both companies continue operating independently.

For those designing products in Brazil, the relevant data point isn't the price. It's who is buying, and how that buyer usually treats what it buys. Miro has become infrastructure for discovery, workshops, journey mapping, retrospectives, and research affinity in practically every design and product team that works remote or hybrid. Changing the owner of a tool like this affects pricing, roadmap, and, ultimately, the decision to keep betting on it.

Who is Bending Spoons, and why the track record matters

Bending Spoons isn't a product company in the traditional sense. The announcement itself describes the model clearly: it acquires digital businesses, applies deep transformations and continuous optimizations to grow profit sustainably, and reinvests in new acquisitions. The current portfolio includes Airtable, AOL, Brightcove, Eventbrite, Evernote, Tractive, Vimeo, and WeTransfer. The Airtable acquisition, incidentally, was completed the week before the Miro announcement.

The passage designers and PMs should read carefully is this one, about how the company operates what it acquires:

The transformation is typically deep and involves reorganizing teams, overhauling technology, redesigning interfaces, accelerating product development, and enhancing marketing and monetization. AI tends to be both a central component of the vision and a key tool in implementing the transformation.

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-- Bending Spoons announcement

"Redesigning interfaces" and "enhancing monetization" are exactly the two points that affect the day-to-day of whoever uses the tool. The model described in the announcement itself already gives a sense of what tends to happen: team reorganization, technology overhaul, interface redesign, and marketing and monetization adjustments are part of the company's standard playbook in its acquisitions, a portfolio that today includes Evernote. There is no promise, in the official source, to keep Miro's pricing or plan structure, so any assurance along those lines would be speculation.

The announcement highlights, in its institutional section, that Bending Spoons has been executing this strategy for over a decade and, to date, "has never sold a material business". CEO Luca Ferrari, meanwhile, stated that the company intends to "own and operate" Miro for a long time, investing in the fundamentals customers value: performance, reliability, and functionality. For teams that depend on large canvases and deal with freezes during live sessions, real performance improvements would be welcome. Whether they come before or after a pricing overhaul is left open.

Miro's size, and why it's an acquisition target

The disclosed numbers help explain the appetite. According to the announcement, Miro has:

| Metric | Reported value | |---|---| | Annual recurring revenue (ARR) | ~$600 million | | Share of ARR from business/enterprise | ~90% | | Paying users | ~4 million | | Customers | 250,000 organizations | | Total users | more than 100 million | | Customers with ARR above $100,000 | more than 750 |

In other words: a massive base, revenue concentrated in corporate and enterprise accounts, and high ticket values on large contracts. It's exactly the kind of business profile Bending Spoons' model looks for, because there's room for "monetization optimization" without scaring off a base that already pays a premium. Andrey Khusid, Miro's co-founder and CEO, described the platform as an "AI-first workspace" and said "the best version of Miro is still to come".

The repositioning as an AI tool was already underway before the acquisition, with the "canvas as prompt" concept the company sells today. It fits the buyer's strategy, which places AI as a central component of its transformations. In practice, it's likely the roadmap will accelerate toward generative features within the canvas, which could be good for assisted discovery, but is also the kind of functionality that tends to become a paid add-on in a higher tier.

What changes for design and product teams in Brazil

Nothing changes for now. The companies remain separate until closing, expected in the fourth quarter of 2026, and still pending regulatory approval. But it's worth starting to think about three concrete fronts:

• Pricing and plans. This is the most sensitive point. Brazilian teams already pay for Miro subscriptions in dollars, and the exchange rate makes any price hike painful. If Bending Spoons repeats its pattern of revising plans, cost per seat could rise, or features currently included could migrate to more expensive tiers. Long-term renewals signed before closing could be worth it as a price lock.
• Continuity of features and support. Team reorganization can affect release cadence and support quality in the short term. It's worth watching the changelog and support responsiveness in the months following closing.
• Portability plan B. This is the moment to map out what part of your operation is tied to Miro and how easy it would be to leave. Templates, research boards, voting systems, and integrations with Jira, Figma, and the like don't always export cleanly. Competitors like FigJam (from Figma, which remains independent after Adobe abandoned its acquisition in December 2023 due to regulatory hurdles), Mural, and Excalidraw (open source) enter the conversation as alternatives depending on the use case.

The editorial takeaway isn't to abandon Miro. It's that a design tool becomes a silent dependency until the day its owner changes. This is the moment to look at Miro as a vendor, not as a fixed part of the environment: understand the contract, renewal deadline, what's exportable, and what the real cost of an eventual migration would be. A product decision is also a decision about the tooling that sustains the product, and that tooling just changed hands.

The full financial details and timeline are in Bending Spoons' official announcement. What isn't there, and what matters to whoever uses the tool, only time after closing will answer.