From $17.5B to $1.36B: Bending Spoons Buys Miro for 92% Off Its Pandemic Peak

In January 2022, at the very peak of the pandemic-era collaboration boom, Miro raised a $400 million Series C led by ICONIQ Capital that valued the digital whiteboard startup at $17.5 billion. It was one of the largest valuations ever assigned to a private software company, and it was earned: Miro’s infinite canvas had become the default place where distributed teams ran retrospectives, mapped user journeys, and sketched architectures.

On September 10, 2026, that number received its formal epitaph. Bending Spoons, the Milan-based technology conglomerate, announced a definitive agreement to acquire Miro in an all-cash transaction at an enterprise value of $1.355 billion. That is roughly one-thirteenth of the 2022 figure — a discount of about 92%.

What the deal actually says

The structure is classic Bending Spoons: all cash, definitive agreement, no financing contingencies publicly disclosed, and a closing expected in the fourth quarter of 2026. Reuters pegged the headline number at $1.36 billion; the company’s own press release states $1.355 billion in enterprise value.

For Miro’s founders — Andrey Khusid and Oleg Shardin, who started the company in 2011 as RealtimeBoard — the outcome is bittersweet. They built a genuinely beloved product with more than 50 million users and deep moats of enterprise workflow integration. But the company raised only $476 million across its entire life, meaning the 2022 valuation was always more a mark of investor enthusiasm than a price anyone ever paid in full. An all-cash exit at $1.355 billion is real money, just not the money 2022 promised.

The Bending Spoons playbook

To understand why this deal matters beyond Miro, you have to understand the buyer. Bending Spoons is not a strategic acquirer in the traditional sense — it is a roll-up engine, arguably the most successful one the consumer and prosumer software world has produced.

The pattern is now well established. The company went public on Nasdaq in July 2026, raising roughly $1.68 billion and popping 40% on its first day of trading to close near a $25.7 billion market cap. Its acquisition ledger reads like a museum of once-dominant internet brands: AOL, Evernote, Meetup, Eventbrite, WeTransfer, Vimeo ($1.38 billion, September 2025), and — in its first post-IPO move — Airtable, which it agreed to buy for $1.285 billion in cash on August 4, 2026.

Miro is the second post-IPO acquisition, and the second billion-dollar-plus one in just over a month. The strategy is consistent: buy stagnating-but-cash-generative software brands at a fraction of their peak private marks, apply aggressive monetization and cost discipline, and consolidate them into a portfolio that now spans hundreds of millions of users.

Why the valuation collapsed

Miro’s slide from $17.5 billion to $1.355 billion is not primarily a story about Miro failing. By most accounts the company kept growing after 2022 — estimates put revenue in the $560-665 million range for 2023-2024, with ARR crossing $500 million. The product held its ground against FigJam, Microsoft Whiteboard, and a wave of AI-native competitors.

The collapse is a story about what the market will pay for that profile. Three forces converged:

The end of the growth-at-all-costs regime. When interest rates turned in 2022, software multiples compressed brutally. A collaboration tool growing in the mid-single digits annually — PM Insights estimated Miro’s 2024 growth at just 5.56% — stopped being a venture-scale asset and became a value asset. And value assets trade on cash flow, not on narrative.

Category commoditization. Whiteboarding itself became a feature, not a product. Figma embedded it, Microsoft bundled it, and every AI note-taking and meeting assistant added a canvas. Miro’s own AI features were well-received, but AI simultaneously lowered the switching costs that made the sticky canvas a moat.

The private-market mark was never real. At $420 million of 2022 revenue, the $17.5 billion valuation implied a 41.7x revenue multiple — a number that only made sense in a world where growth would continue at 2021 velocities forever. Sacra’s analysis flagged this at the time. The $1.355 billion price today implies roughly 2-2.4x revenue for a mature, slowing SaaS business, which is squarely within the range where comparable take-privates have cleared.

What happens to Miro now

Bending Spoons’ public statements emphasize continuity: the product will live on, the team will be integrated, and the company will invest in Miro’s AI capabilities. Users of other acquired brands can fill in the rest of the story from experience. Evernote’s acquisition was followed by layoffs and a push toward premium pricing; AOL and Meetup follow similar monetization-first templates.

The realistic expectation is that Miro becomes the collaborative canvas layer inside a growing portfolio of work tools — sitting alongside Airtable’s databases and Vimeo’s video — cross-sold to a consolidated user base, with pricing tuned for revenue per user rather than user growth. For teams that rely on Miro’s free and low tiers, history suggests scrutiny of the pricing page is warranted.

The larger signal

The most important reading of this deal is as a data point in the great private-mark repricing of 2024-2026. Miro is far from alone: Airtable’s $1.285 billion sale against an $11.7 billion peak, and a string of similar take-privates, show that the universe of companies marked at $10 billion+ in 2021-2022 is clearing the market at 10 cents on the dollar when it clears at all.

For founders, the lesson is bracing: the valuation you raise at is a liability if the business’s actual trajectory can’t grow into it. For the AI industry specifically, Miro is a cautionary tale about the class of companies that AI was supposed to empower — and that AI instead turned into a commodity layer that eroded their pricing power.

And for Bending Spoons, the message is that the war chest raised in July’s IPO is being deployed exactly as promised. Two billion-dollar acquisitions in five weeks. The roll-up of the software industry’s lost decade is proceeding on schedule, and there is every sign the shopping list is longer than Miro.