Bending Spoons to purchase collaboration instruments maker Miro for $1.36B, 90% lower than its 2022 valuation

Bending Spoons is constant its development of shopping for once-sought-after software program corporations 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 software known as RealtimeBoard, Miro discovered nice fortune in the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, when corporations moved to distant work en masse, and located their staff wanting to copy the expertise of collaborating on a bodily whiteboard.

Miro rapidly capitalized on that momentum by constructing a platform that would 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 frequent instruments and customise the bottom product to satisfy their wants. As we speak, 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% — elements that seemingly contributed to its immense valuation on the time.

By all indications, the corporate has continued rising, although not at that blistering tempo. As we speak, Miro has greater than 4 million paying customers and 100 million whole customers. Bending Spoons stated 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 corporations to tighten spending by slicing down on duplicate apps and licenses. Miro, competing with much-better funded rivals resembling Canva, Figma, and Microsoft within the office collaboration area, seemingly 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 staff in 2022, lower jobs twice, laying off 119 staff in February 2023 and reportedly another 275 people in October 2024.

Bending Spoons, nevertheless, might be comfortable it is ready to snap up an organization that’s been doing fairly effectively for a smidgen of its former, arguably inflated, worth. In that manner, Miro is fairly much like Airtable, which was valued at over $11 billion within the increase days of 2021, however sold to Bending Spoons for $1.28 billion last month.

The Italian serial acquirer of software program corporations appears to be exploiting a selected change: Giant, recognizable SaaS corporations that had been priced in 2021 as in the event that they’d turn into software program giants, however matured into slower-growing however nonetheless substantial companies with respectable recurring income and established consumer bases.

Nonetheless, it’s curious why Miro’s board and traders agreed to promote at that value now, particularly seeing that the corporate didn’t apparently want the money. Has confidence in SaaS corporations with the ability to go public or discover a comparable exit actually plummeted that low?