Bending Spoons Agrees to Buy Miro for $1.36 Billion, a Tenth of Its 2021 Valuation

Bending Spoons, the Milan-based technology holding company that has spent the past three years buying fading consumer and workplace software brands, agreed on September 10 to acquire the online whiteboard company Miro for $1.355 billion in cash, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The price amounts to roughly a tenth of the $17.5 billion valuation investors assigned Miro during the pandemic-era collaboration-software boom of late 2021.

The deal, disclosed in a joint statement carried on Bending Spoons' investor relations site and on Miro's own company blog, is Bending Spoons' second billion-dollar purchase of a onetime software unicorn in five weeks. It agreed in early August to buy the workplace database company Airtable for an enterprise value of $1.285 billion, a transaction that closed in early September. Together the two deals mark one of the more visible consolidations of the venture-backed "collaboration software" category that raised tens of billions of dollars during 2020 and 2021 and has since struggled to justify those valuations as growth slowed and competition from AI-native tools intensified.

The numbers behind the deal

Under the agreement, Bending Spoons will pay $1.355 billion in enterprise value for Miro, which nets out to an equity value of approximately $1.79 billion once Miro's roughly $435 million in net cash is factored in, according to the SEC filing. The transaction is structured as an all-cash purchase of 100% of Miro's outstanding shares, though certain Miro shareholders have agreed to roll $295 million of their proceeds into newly issued Bending Spoons equity rather than cash out entirely.

Miro is not a distressed business by conventional metrics. The company reports roughly $600 million in annual recurring revenue, with nearly 90% of that coming from business and enterprise customers rather than free or individual users. It counts more than 250,000 organizations as customers, including 750 with annual contracts exceeding $100,000, and says it has been profitable, funding itself without new outside capital since 2022. TechCrunch reported that the company has close to 4 million paying users among 100 million total registered users, and integrates with more than 250 other workplace applications, including products from Atlassian, Cisco, Microsoft and Zoom. The deal is expected to close in the fourth quarter of 2026, subject to antitrust and other regulatory clearances.

How Miro got here

Miro began in 2011 as RealtimeBoard, a digital whiteboard startup, before rebranding in 2019. Its user base exploded once offices emptied out in 2020: the company grew from roughly 5 million to 30 million users within two years as remote and hybrid teams adopted virtual whiteboards for brainstorming and planning, and its paying customer base grew more than 550% over the same stretch, per TechCrunch's reporting. That growth culminated in a funding round in late 2021 that valued the company at $17.5 billion, one of the higher marks of the era's software boom.

The reversal since then has been steep. As remote work normalized and hiring slowed across the technology sector, Miro's growth cooled and its headcount, once near 1,200 employees in 2022, was cut twice: by 119 people in February 2023 and by a further 275 in October 2024, according to Reworked's account of the company's recent history. The $1.79 billion equity price Bending Spoons is now paying represents roughly a 90% discount to Miro's peak private valuation, a decline that mirrors what happened to Airtable, which Bending Spoons bought weeks earlier for a fraction of the more than $11 billion valuation it commanded in 2021.

Who is affected

Bending Spoons has built its business model around buying exactly this kind of company: recognizable software brands that grew fast, raised large amounts of venture capital, and then matured into slower-growing but still-profitable businesses with entrenched user bases. Its existing portfolio includes Evernote, Vimeo, WeTransfer, Brightcove, Eventbrite, AOL and, as of last week, Airtable. The pattern after each purchase has typically involved aggressive cost-cutting. Following its 2023 acquisition of Evernote, the note-taking app's full-time headcount fell from 341 to 60 by the end of 2024, an 82% reduction, and after buying the file-transfer service WeTransfer in 2024, Bending Spoons cut roughly three-quarters of that company's staff within months, according to reporting cited by both TechCrunch and Reworked.

Neither company has disclosed what will happen to Miro's roughly 13 global offices or its remaining workforce once the deal closes, and Bending Spoons executives have not announced specific restructuring plans. That silence, paired with the company's track record, is the central source of uncertainty for Miro's employees and for the enterprise customers, including large corporate accounts, who rely on the product for day-to-day planning and design work. PYMNTS noted that the acquisition extends a broader trend of legacy SaaS companies being absorbed by roll-up buyers once their growth rates fall below what public or late-stage private markets are willing to reward.

Reaction and what happens next

Executives from both companies framed the deal publicly as a long-term partnership rather than a rescue. Miro co-founder and chief executive Andrey Khusid said in the joint announcement, carried on both companies' own sites, that the acquisition would let the company keep investing in its product roadmap without the pressures of continued fundraising.

"The best version of Miro is still ahead of us. Partnering with Bending Spoons lets us deliver on that vision with ambition, for the customers who count on us," Khusid said.

Bending Spoons chief executive Luca Ferrari said the company saw an opportunity in a widely used product, noting it was "a privilege to welcome a product that over 250,000 organizations have integrated into their workflows." Bending Spoons, which listed on the Nasdaq on July 1, 2026, has itself continued to grow quickly, reporting second-quarter revenue of $704 million, up 126% year over year, alongside net income of $177 million.

The Miro transaction is subject to customary closing conditions and regulatory approval, with both companies saying they will continue operating independently until it closes, expected in the fourth quarter of 2026. Bending Spoons' legal counsel on the deal includes Latham & Watkins, with financial advice from BNP Paribas, J.P. Morgan and EY; Miro is advised by Goodwin Procter and Morgan Stanley. Investors and Miro's workforce are likely to watch closely for any post-closing announcements on staffing and office consolidation, given how quickly Bending Spoons moved to cut costs at Evernote and WeTransfer after those deals closed.