Bending Spoons to Buy Miro at a 90% Markdown From Its 2022 Peak

Bending Spoons has agreed to buy Miro, the online whiteboard that grew into a workplace collaboration platform, in an all-cash deal that values the business at $1.355 billion. Add Miro's roughly $435 million in net cash and the equity value flowing to shareholders comes to about $1.79 billion, the company said on September 10.

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Both boards approved the agreement unanimously, and Bending Spoons will acquire 100% of Miro's shares. The deal is expected to close in the fourth quarter of 2026, subject to regulatory approvals, and until then the two companies will keep operating independently.

Miro was valued at $17.5 billion in a January 2022 funding round. The gap between that number and this one is the story of what four years did to the market for growth software.

A whiteboard that grew into a platform

Miro started in 2011 as RealtimeBoard, founded by Andrey Khusid and Oleg Shardin. It sold a shared digital canvas, the kind of tool that spread fast when offices emptied in 2020. By early 2022 Miro said it had reached 30 million users, worked with 99% of the Fortune 100, and had raised $400 million in a Series C, bringing total funding to $476 million and its valuation to $17.5 billion, according to the company.

The growth held. Bending Spoons says Miro now runs at around $600 million in annual recurring revenue, with nearly 90% of that coming from business and enterprise customers. Miro serves more than 100 million users across 250,000 customer organizations, counts close to 4 million paying users, and has over 750 customers each paying more than $100,000 a year, the acquirer's announcement states.

What changed is how investors price that kind of business. Miro never raised again after 2022 and has said it stayed profitable, according to Reworked. It also spent the past three years repositioning itself, from a whiteboard into what it now calls an AI innovation workspace, adding assistants, automated workflows, and connectors to tools such as GitHub, Jira, and Slack.

That pivot is unfinished. The company launched the AI workspace in 2024, and in March 2026 it bought Reforge, a product-strategy training business, to deepen its enterprise offering. The bet is that the canvas becomes the place where human teams and AI agents work side by side, which sounds like a large market and also a crowded one. Rivals including Figma, Lucid, and Microsoft have been adding AI features to their own canvases at the same time. Like many software companies of its generation, Miro has had to prove that collaboration products still compound while AI redraws what teams are willing to pay for.

The multiple behind the headline

Headlines about a 90% haircut are accurate, though the comparison mixes two different measures. The $17.5 billion was a post-money private valuation from a funding round. The $1.355 billion is an enterprise value, which strips out cash and debt. Set against roughly $600 million in ARR, the enterprise value works out to about 2.3 times revenue, StartupXO calculated.

That is a sober multiple for a company that is profitable and still adding users. It is also close to what Bending Spoons paid for its previous target. On August 4 it agreed to buy Airtable, the no-code database company, at an enterprise value of $1.285 billion, against roughly $480 million in ARR, or about 2.7 times, The Next Web reported. That deal closed on September 4, six days before the Miro announcement. Airtable had been valued above $11 billion in 2021, per AInvest.

Two discounted enterprise software deals in six weeks is not coincidence. It is a repricing.

The buyer that never sells

Bending Spoons is a Milan-based company that buys mature digital businesses, rebuilds them, and holds on. Its portfolio includes Airtable, AOL, Brightcove, Eventbrite, Evernote, Tractive, Vimeo, and WeTransfer. It went public on the Nasdaq on July 1, 2026, pricing at $29 a share and raising about $1.68 billion at a valuation near $18.4 billion, TechCrunch reported.

The model is deliberately unromantic. Bending Spoons looks for businesses with durable revenue that have stopped growing quickly, then reworks their technology, products, and costs. Its chief executive and co-founder, Luca Ferrari, framed the intent in the announcement:

We acquire businesses with the intention of owning and operating them for the long term, and Miro will be no exception.

The approach produces high margins and cash that funds the next purchase. It has also produced deep job cuts at some acquisitions, a pattern Miro's staff will be watching. Miro's own headcount had already been shrinking. It cut 119 roles, about 7% of staff, in February 2023, then roughly 275 more, about 18%, in October 2024 as corporate spending on niche software tightened, the San Francisco Chronicle reported.

For Miro's leadership, the pitch is stability rather than more venture money. "Partnering with Bending Spoons lets us deliver on that vision with ambition," Khusid wrote to employees, in a note published on Miro's blog. He added that Bending Spoons would spend time understanding the business after closing before making decisions about structure and roles, subject to local law.

The market's verdict

Public investors did not read the announcement as bad news. Bending Spoons shares rose as much as 8% in early trading on September 10, TipRanks reported, and the stock closed at $39.67, up about 5% on the day. The gain came against a difficult stretch: the shares had fallen nearly 23% over the previous month, Silicon Republic noted.

A deal that adds $600 million of enterprise recurring revenue at a low multiple is easy for a market to like, particularly when the buyer's entire thesis rests on continuing to buy. The harder test is whether Bending Spoons can keep finding targets it can afford. Its shares trade at a rich multiple of reported earnings, and much of that price assumes more acquisitions will follow.

A financing engine under strain

The Miro deal is modest next to Bending Spoons' ambitions, and that may be the point. In August, Bank of America analyst Omar Dessouky wrote that roughly $23 of the company's share price reflected value from future acquisitions, implying about $18 billion of additional dealmaking. He estimated Bending Spoons could add only around $7 billion in debt capacity by the end of 2027 if it made no further purchases, according to Yahoo Finance.

The balance sheet behind that view: $4.09 billion in net debt and a 2.4-times leverage ratio at the end of the second quarter, with $793 million in cash and $1.28 billion of unused revolving credit capacity, Bending Spoons told investors. Second-quarter revenue was $704 million, up 126% year over year, though much of that growth comes from businesses it has bought rather than from products it already owned, per AInvest.

That puts the seller reinvestment in focus. Certain Miro shareholders have agreed to put $295 million of their proceeds back into newly issued Bending Spoons equity, which trims the cash the buyer actually has to find. Sellers who choose stock over cash are making a bet on the acquirer, and the merger filing with the SEC confirms both the $1.355 billion figure and the reinvestment.

The advisory roster is conventional for a transaction this size. Morgan Stanley is Miro's exclusive financial advisor and Goodwin Procter is its legal counsel. Latham & Watkins advised Bending Spoons, which also used BNP Paribas and J.P. Morgan as co-financial advisors, according to the announcement. A discount price does not mean a discounted process.

What to watch

The clearest near-term question is whether regulators raise objections. Bending Spoons has bought a long string of consumer and productivity brands without drawing much antitrust friction, but stacking Airtable and Miro within weeks invites a closer look at how much enterprise collaboration software one company should hold.

After closing, the harder work begins. Bending Spoons must absorb two large enterprise platforms at once while keeping the customers who pay six figures from walking. Miro's users are embedded in design, engineering, and product teams, and switching costs cut both ways. A cheaper product that becomes less reliable would hand a rare opening to rivals such as Figma, Lucid, and Microsoft's Whiteboard, all of which would happily take a dissatisfied enterprise account.

There is also the macro signal. When a profitable company with $600 million in recurring revenue and blue-chip logos sells for about 2.3 times revenue, the message to founders is that the pandemic-era multiples are not returning. The buyers now are not growth investors chasing the next round. They are operators with balance sheets, patience, and a playbook for pulling cash out of software that already works.

Miro's investors earned a return, and they accepted a price roughly a tenth of the peak. For a generation of software companies raised on the idea that scale alone justified the valuation, that may be the most telling number in the entire transaction.