Miro sold for $1.36 billion, 90% below its 2021 peak

Bending Spoons, an Italian company known for buying once-famous software for a fraction of its value, closed the acquisition of Miro for $1.36 billion in cash (an equity value of $1.79 billion). The number stands out for the comparison: in late 2021, at the height of the euphoria over remote work tools, Miro was valued at $17.5 billion. That's a drop of about 92%.

For the audience that lives Miro in practice (designers running discovery workshops, PMs building roadmaps on a whiteboard, UX teams doing remote journey mapping), the news isn't about finance. It's about what happens to a tool that became the standard for visual collaboration when it changes hands.

From RealtimeBoard to "AI innovation workspace"

Miro was born in 2011 as RealtimeBoard, an online whiteboard. The big leap came with the pandemic: as companies migrated en masse to remote work, teams began wanting to recreate the experience of collaborating on a physical board. Miro rode that wave and built a platform with integrations to more than 250 apps, along with partnerships with Atlassian, Cisco, Microsoft, and Zoom.

Today the company presents itself as an "AI innovation workspace," with AI assistants for boards, automated workflows, prototyping tools, and AI connectors that pull context from platforms like GitHub, Jira, and Slack. It's this positioning (AI-assisted design and ideation) that the new owner is buying.

The numbers behind the sale

The detail that stands out most in the deal is that Miro doesn't appear to be in an operational crisis. According to data released by Bending Spoons, the company keeps growing, albeit at a much slower pace than during the pandemic:

| Metric | 2022 (peak) | Current | |---|---|---| | Valuation | $17.5B (late 2021) | $1.36B (purchase) | | Total users | ~30 million | ~100 million | | Paying users | 550% growth | more than 4 million | | Annual recurring revenue | — | ~$600 million | | Net cash | — | ~$435 million |

On top of that, 90% of recurring revenue comes from businesses and large customers, and the company is profitable. In other words: it apparently didn't need the money. That makes the question raised by TechCrunch the most interesting one in this story: why did Miro's board and investors agree to sell at this price now? The suggested reading is that confidence in SaaS companies' ability to go public or find a comparable exit has collapsed.

What happened to the SaaS market

The 92% drop isn't just about Miro, it's about the entire market. The multiples the market paid for software-as-a-service in 2021 unwound. With the pandemic's favorable winds gone, companies tightened spending, cut duplicate apps and licenses, and started preferring integrated product suites over standalone collaboration tools.

In this scenario, Miro was competing with much better-capitalized rivals: Canva, Figma, and Microsoft. Meanwhile, it was shrinking its own headcount. Of the roughly 1,200 employees in 2022, there were two rounds of cuts: 119 people in February 2023 and another 275 in October 2024, according to the report.

The Bending Spoons pattern

The Miro purchase follows a playbook that Bending Spoons has been repeating: acquiring large, well-known SaaS companies that were priced in 2021 as if they were going to become giants, but that matured into slow-growth yet solid businesses, with decent recurring revenue and an established user base.

The most direct parallel is Airtable, valued at more than $11 billion in 2021 and sold to the same Bending Spoons for $1.28 billion the previous month. The Italian company has already built up a portfolio of software bought this way, which helps explain the modus operandi: pay cheap for mature brands and extract value from what already exists.

Acquisitions of this type, made to extract value from a mature base, tend to come with restructuring and pricing policy changes. That's the point Brazilian professionals need to watch closely.

What changes for those using Miro in Brazil

Here's the angle that matters to those who design products. Miro has become a baseline tool for many Brazilian design and product teams: brainstorming sessions, affinity maps, service blueprints, agile retrospectives, sprint planning. When this changes hands, some points remain open and are worth monitoring:

• Pricing. Acquisitions made to extract value from a mature base tend to change plans and pricing. It's worth tracking renewal terms and having clarity on how much of your workflow depends exclusively on Miro.
• Product roadmap. The "AI innovation workspace" positioning could be accelerated or slowed down under new ownership. If your team has adopted the AI assistants and connectors (GitHub, Jira, Slack) as part of your process, it's wise to know which features are critical.
• Portability. Regardless of the outcome, it makes sense to know how to export your boards and reduce switching costs. Tools like FigJam, Excalidraw, and the Figma ecosystem itself are known alternatives for collaborative whiteboarding.

None of this means Miro will get worse. The company is profitable, has 100 million users, and $600 million in recurring revenue, numbers that provide some breathing room. But a change of control always reorganizes priorities, and product teams that depend on a daily tool do well to understand the new owner before the change arrives.

What's left for product people

The product lesson that runs through this story goes beyond Miro. A $17.5 billion valuation in 2021 didn't translate into a proportionally bigger business: it became a healthy company, but "only" a substantial one. For those who build products, the takeaway is about the difference between market hype and real value delivered to the user. Miro grew because it solved a concrete problem (remote visual collaboration) and became embedded in the workflow of millions of teams. That value survived the market correction. The inflated multiple did not.