Bending Spoons buying Miro for $1.355B

If you’re using it, you should plan to migrate off ASAP. I’ve been a long time user of Harvest, and after Bending Spoons acquired it, they increased our pricing by 800%.

They bought Airtable last month for a similarly distressed valuation.

The SaaSpocalypse has hit the post-Covid highfliers, and Bending Spoons is the grim reaper.

I don't suppose there is any big synergy hopes here. They're just identifying companies with relatively sticky enterprise accounts and will milk those.

Wow, this is quite shocking. I used to work in Amsterdam and Miro used to be one of more well-known companies there. A few of my friends worked there at some point.

I used it quite heavily at one company. I found it a bit bloated, but it was ok, and I didn't have to jump between one tool and another, it allowed me to draw some diagrams, do retrospective, share ideas with others.

Clearly the pandemic skyrocketed their valuation to a level they couldn't maintain...

I have some friends there. Morale in the company was very very low. There were multiple rounds of lay-offs and management went AI crazy. They were desperate to live up to their extreme valuation from 2022. "We have to be the future of work" etc. Now the exit was 10x lower than their max valuation.

Great whiteboarding tool though.

2xARR is extremely low, I'd like to know why they sold. After being valued at 17B selling for close to ~2B is interesting.

Notion is next

Tried Miro once.

Wasn’t a whiteboard replacement.

Wasn’t design software.

Wasn’t a PM tool.

Even when the Miro power users would bust it out in meetings, it was always so painful to watch.

I don’t know what the point of Miro really was. There was a time Figma was doing something similar (FigJam), so maybe there was a trend for a sec.

No idea why or how it’s worth over a billion dollars.

Anyone reading this going “Noooo not Miro!!!” ?

Can they just buy Atlassian.

Overheard: "The Italian exit"

Didn't know Uri Geller was an investor now.

Isn't Bending Spoons the one who acquired Vimeo then fired all but a skeleton staff?

miro is my go-to for putting together diagrams for slide decks, but after having tried using it to actually work on things a few times, i've just come to the conclusion that actually virtual whiteboards are a bad UX for most things, inevitably you spend more time organizing the board than actually getting work done

Bending Spoons is on a buying spree!

Miro acquired my startup back in '21[0], so this is bittersweet as our users will be (eventually) affected by this. Founders and employees at Miro definitely deserve to cash out for their hard work and it's unclear (ie. not publicly known) if they will since this is a 10x down round.

Also weird that they had to sell - they were one of the most established (visual) collaboration platforms out there. I'd be keen on learning about the inside story if it ever gets public.

BS is known for aggressive management of companies they acquire, optimizing for cash flow and revenue, firing most/all of the original team, etc. Their acquisitions before Miro include Airtable, Eventbrite, AOL, Vimeo, Meetup, Evernote ... for at least a few of those, my direct experience with the product afterwards or in chats with their users, the platforms does get enshittified.

Hope that's not a deal here.

[0] https://blog.senko.net/the-story-of-a-web-whiteboard

Here I was thinking they were talking about the video player

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miro_(video_software)

Is that financed by all the other companies they extract from?

As a Miro user (by force): why?

BS is slowly but steadily growing their userbase. Knowhing how did it go for their other purchases, of which I was using many (Komoot, Eventbrite, Meetup), not a single one has avoided constant nags of prompting for upgrades and dark patterns, so this will most likely end up in a similar way.

As many share, I used Miro and found it quite nice.

is the $100K ARR quote a typo?

Another dead tool whose users will be sucked dry. Vampire equity at is best