During the pandemic, when offices emptied and teams scattered, the whiteboard became the shared desk. Miro built a business on that shift, turning a blank digital canvas into a tool nearly 90 percent of whose revenue comes from enterprises. On September 10, an Italian buyer agreed to pay $1.36 billion in cash to take it.
Bending Spoons, a technology group based in Milan, announced the all-cash acquisition of the online whiteboard platform. Counting the net cash on Miro’s balance sheet, the deal implies an equity value of about $1.79 billion. The transaction is expected to close in the fourth quarter.
The sale comes less than a month after Bending Spoons agreed to buy Airtable, the database-software company, for $1.29 billion in August. Two large, mature software brands, both well past their startup years, are now headed into the same company in the span of a few weeks.
Bending Spoons itself is a newcomer to the public markets. The group listed on Nasdaq in July, raising about $1.68 billion in an initial public offering. Its pitch to investors was a simple one: take profitable but overlooked software companies, run them more efficiently, and let a single platform bear the costs of marketing and operations.
Miro fits that profile. The company generates annual recurring revenue of about $600 million, and its customers are large organizations that use the canvas for planning, design and collaboration. Some of Miro’s shareholders agreed to reinvest $295 million of their proceeds into new Bending Spoons shares, according to the company.
The playbook is often described in Europe’s startup press as buy and slim down. Bending Spoons has built a reputation for acquiring apps with loyal users and modest growth, then cutting costs and raising prices while keeping the product running. Its portfolio already includes names such as Evernote, WeTransfer and Issuu, all of which came through the same door.
Miro is a bigger fish than most. A tool with $600 million in recurring revenue and a near-enterprise-only customer base is a serious asset, and the price reflects it. At roughly two times annual revenue, the deal is not cheap by the standards of private software mergers, though it sits below the multiples commanded by the fastest-growing AI startups.
The company was co-founded in 2011 by Andrey Khusid and Oleg Shardin, and it raised hundreds of millions of dollars over the years from investors that included Iconiq, Accel and Atlassian. It was valued at $17.5 billion in a 2022 funding round, a number that now looks distant, since the deal announced this week prices the company at a fraction of that peak.
That gap tells the story of the software market since 2022. When interest rates rose and the tech selloff took hold, private valuations reset sharply, and companies that had been priced for hypergrowth had to settle for less. Miro is one of many that raised at the top and is now selling at a mark well below it.
For Bending Spoons, the attraction is not the growth story but the cash flow. The group’s founders have argued that stable, cash-generating software businesses are underpriced by a market obsessed with artificial intelligence. Buying them with public-market money raised in July turns that argument into a strategy.
The Airtable and Miro deals together commit more than $2.6 billion in cash, a meaningful portion of what the IPO raised. Analysts said the pace is aggressive for a company only two months out of its listing, and that the market will watch whether the acquired businesses can be run more profitably without shedding customers.
Miro’s enterprise base is the part Bending Spoons is most likely to protect. Large customers pay for reliability, security and support, and a heavy-handed cost-cutting pass could push them toward competitors such as Figma, which has pushed into whiteboarding, or Microsoft’s own collaboration tools.
The transaction also carries a symbolic weight for Europe’s technology sector. Bending Spoons is one of the continent’s most prominent software consolidators, and its ability to raise money on Nasdaq and then deploy it across a string of acquisitions is a model few European peers have matched.
Some Miro shareholders are betting on the outcome rather than cashing out entirely. The $295 million they agreed to roll into new Bending Spoons stock keeps them exposed to the combined company, a sign that at least part of the seller base believes the buy-and-run playbook has room to work.
What happens next is a test of that belief. Bending Spoons will inherit a product used by teams inside some of the world’s largest companies, along with the task of keeping those teams happy while extracting more profit from them. The closing is expected before the end of the year, and the integration will be watched closely by investors who bought into the July listing.
The company has spent years turning a collection of aging apps into a profitable machine. Miro is the largest single asset that machine has taken on, and the next few quarters will show whether the formula scales from small utilities to a product that enterprises rely on every day.
