Bending Spoons is constant its pattern of shopping for once-sought-after software program firms for pennies on the greenback. This time, the Italian firm is shopping for Miro for $1.36 billion in money (fairness worth of $1.79 billion), a mighty dip in valuation for the once-hot office collaboration startup that was awarded a price tag of $17.5 billion in late 2021.
Based in 2011 as a whiteboarding device referred to as RealtimeBoard, Miro discovered nice fortune throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, when firms moved to distant work en masse, and located their workers wanting to duplicate the expertise of collaborating on a bodily whiteboard.
Miro shortly capitalized on that momentum by constructing a platform that might combine with greater than 250 apps, and struck partnerships with Atlassian, Cisco, Microsoft, and Zoom. The corporate additionally began letting its customers construct integrations with widespread instruments and customise the bottom product to satisfy their wants. Right this moment, it calls itself an “AI innovation workspace” that gives AI assistants for its whiteboard instruments, AI workflows, prototyping instruments, and AI connectors that pull context from numerous platforms like GitHub, Jira, and Slack.
By 2022, Miro had grown from 5 million to about 30 million customers inside a scant two years, and its paying buyer base had expanded by 550% — components that possible contributed to its immense valuation on the time.
By all indications, the corporate has continued rising, although not at that blistering tempo. Right this moment, Miro has greater than 4 million paying customers and 100 million complete customers. Bending Spoons mentioned Miro now has about $600 million in annual recurring income, of which 90% comes from companies and enterprises. The corporate additionally has about $435 million in web money, and is worthwhile.
Nonetheless, the 92% dip in Miro’s valuation is illustrative of simply how a lot software-as-a-service (SaaS) multiples have unwound since its heydays of 2021. By 2022, the dying pandemic tailwinds spurred firms to tighten spending by chopping down on duplicate apps and licenses. Miro, competing with much-better funded rivals akin to Canva, Figma, and Microsoft within the office collaboration area, possible discovered itself shoved apart as companies began preferring suites of varied merchandise as a substitute of particular person collaboration instruments.
Miro, which had about 1,200 workers in 2022, lower jobs twice, laying off 119 staff in February 2023 and reportedly another 275 people in October 2024.
Bending Spoons, nonetheless, might be pleased it is ready to snap up an organization that’s been doing fairly properly for a smidgen of its former, arguably inflated, worth. In that method, Miro is fairly just like Airtable, which was valued at over $11 billion within the growth days of 2021, however sold to Bending Spoons for $1.28 billion last month.
The Italian serial acquirer of software program firms appears to be exploiting a particular change: Giant, recognizable SaaS firms that have been priced in 2021 as in the event that they’d turn out to be software program giants, however matured into slower-growing however nonetheless substantial companies with first rate recurring income and established person bases.
Nonetheless, it’s curious why Miro’s board and buyers agreed to promote at that worth now, particularly seeing that the corporate didn’t apparently want the money. Has confidence in SaaS firms having the ability to go public or discover a comparable exit actually plummeted that low?
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