Unicorn Miro, once valued at $17.5B, sold for ~$1.36B enterprise value

In just four years, the once-high-flying collaboration platform Miro has seen its valuation collapse by 90%, from $17.5 billion to approximately $1.79 billion.

A Cautionary Tale from the Era of Easy Money

In the world of venture capital and startup reporting, 2021 has become a recurring reference point—a symbol of the "Great Liquidity Flood" that turned early-stage investing into a speculative frenzy. The consensus now is clear: the flood of cheap money inflated valuations, created a wave of so-called "unicorns" with little substance, and left many venture funds holding overpriced stakes.

The immediate consequence was the capital winter of 2022–2023, when liquidity dried up. The longer-term fallout has been a wave of "pseudo-unicorns" either slashing valuations to survive or collapsing entirely, wiping out investor capital.

But even pessimists might not have predicted that the damage from that era would persist into the second half of 2026—a timeline now seemingly buoyed by the AI narrative.

The Deal: Miro's Steep Decline

Italian tech company Bending Spoons has announced plans to acquire Miro, the remote collaboration platform, at an enterprise value of approximately $1.36 billion. After accounting for Miro's net cash holdings of roughly $435 million, the implied equity value stands at about $1.79 billion.

This represents a staggering drop from Miro's peak valuation of $17.5 billion (approximately ¥117 billion RMB) during its Series C funding round in January 2022. In just four years, the company has lost 90% of its value—a super-unicorn reduced to a mere unicorn.

Miro: A Product of the "Cloud Era"

Early Days: A Genuine Product Vision

It would be somewhat unfair to lump Miro in with the purely speculative "pseudo-unicorns" of the easy-money era. The company was built by a team with genuine product instincts.

Founded in 2012 by Andrey Khusid and Oleg Shardin, Miro (originally named RealtimeBoard) was born out of a real-world problem. The two founders previously ran Vitamin Group, a well-regarded design studio specializing in websites and apps. As the studio's reputation grew, so did the number of out-of-town clients, making communication about design requirements increasingly difficult. Miro was their solution: a real-time digital whiteboard for remote collaboration.

Slow and Steady Growth

For years, Miro remained a "small and beautiful" tool. Khusid later admitted that the team initially didn't even plan to make it a standalone product—they simply wanted to embed a cloud-collaboration whiteboard into a browser.

• 2017: Miro completed its first institutional funding round, raising just $1.3 million from the little-known Altair Capital.
• November 2018: Silicon Valley heavyweight Accel led Miro's $25 million Series A. By then, Miro had 2 million users and about 8,000 enterprise customers, including Netflix, Twitter, Hubspot, and Airbnb. Still, the team remained conservative, positioning Miro as a "real-time whiteboard for remote collaboration."

The Pandemic Accelerator

Then came 2020. The COVID-19 pandemic forced the world into remote work, and demand for collaboration tools exploded.

According to Gartner, only 27% of global white-collar workers had remote work needs in 2019 (defined as working outside the office at least one day per week). By the end of 2020, that figure had surged to 51%, with the U.S. leading at 53%.

Miro became a star overnight.

• April 2020: Miro closed a $50 million Series B round, with participation from Iconiq and NBA star Stephen Curry as a super angel. This was Miro's first real "star project" moment.
• By then, Miro had grown to 5 million users and over 20,000 paid customers.

The Ambition Explodes

In the Series B press release, media no longer described Miro as a "whiteboard." Instead, it was called a "platform"—an integrated hub for various office tools. Khusid's language shifted too: "From the beginning, our vision was to build a real-time collaboration platform. The platform concept is crucial because we want people to build on top of our product."

The Peak: Series C at $17.5 Billion

In January 2022, Miro raised a massive $400 million Series C—more than five times its total prior funding. The valuation skyrocketed to $17.5 billion, a 23x increase from the $750 million valuation at Series B less than two years earlier.

At the time, Miro claimed:

• 30 million users
• Nearly all of the world's top 100 companies as customers
• 20 of the top 100 had annual contracts exceeding $1 million

But the numbers didn't add up. Miro's 2021 revenue was approximately $300 million, meaning its valuation was 58x revenue—a clearly unsustainable multiple.

Expansion at All Costs

Miro expanded aggressively, seemingly betting everything on "tomorrow will be better":

• Headcount doubled in the 12 months before Series C, surpassing 1,000 employees.
• Opened offices in 11 cities, including Berlin, Munich, Tokyo, and London.
• Moved its Amsterdam global headquarters into a historic, landmark building on the Stadhouderskade—a 3,000-square-meter property dating back to the 1920s.
• June 2022: Acquired video collaboration platform Around for an estimated $250–300 million, aiming to compete directly with Zoom.

The Fall: From Hero to Zero

Starting in the second half of 2022, the tide turned. The pandemic receded, the liquidity flood ended, and the "GPT moment" arrived. New tools like Figma and Canva emerged as formidable competitors.

On the public markets, once-hot collaboration stocks like Zoom, Asana, and Monday.com saw their price-to-earnings ratios collapse from peaks of 119x, 89x, and 84x to just 3.3x, 5.2x, and 8.5x by September 2023.

Miro was not immune.

• February 2023: Miro began layoffs and cut non-essential spending. CEO Khusid admitted the company had over-expanded during a "special period" and needed to "adapt to a changing environment."
• 2024: Another round of layoffs, cutting 18% of staff.

Today, Miro's user base has largely plateaued at 100 million total users and 4 million paid users. According to Bending Spoons, Miro's current ARR (Annual Recurring Revenue) is approximately $600 million, with 90% coming from enterprise clients.

At the acquisition price of $1.36 billion enterprise value, that's just 2.3x ARR—a far cry from the 58x revenue multiple of 2022.

Bending Spoons: The Software Industry's "Prometheus Project"

If Miro is a textbook case of the easy-money era, Bending Spoons may well become the textbook case of 2026.

Who Are They?

Founded in 2013 in Italy, Bending Spoons specializes in acquiring "old software companies" and revitalizing them through operational improvements. Their portfolio includes well-known names like AOL, Eventbrite, and Vimeo.

Two standout examples:

1. Evernote (International Version): Acquired in 2023 after years of losses. By 2025, revenue had grown ~30% from 2023 levels, and average revenue per active user had increased 150%.
2. Remini (Photo Editing): Over five years post-acquisition, monthly active users grew 5x, revenue 9x, and average user revenue ~50%.

The Secret Sauce: Not Just AI

While Bending Spoons does use AI, it's not the core of their strategy. Their philosophy is simpler: a small, autonomous team of top talent will always outperform a bloated organization.

In a podcast interview, co-founder Francesco Patarnello outlined three acquisition criteria:

1. Can our platform add real value? — e.g., attracting talent, turning data into insights, or bringing new users.
2. Is the revenue large enough? — They'd rather do fewer, larger deals than send a 50-person team to fix a $20 million revenue company.
3. Is the revenue predictable? — Note: not "is it growing fast."

A "Counter-AI" IPO

On July 3, 2025, Bending Spoons went public on Nasdaq, reaching a market cap of $25 billion (approximately ¥167.7 billion RMB). The podcast 20VC hailed it as a "landmark anti-AI IPO," noting that the company is essentially "a collection of 20-year-old software assets." Its success proves that AI is not the only path to growth—improving products, refining user experience, and repricing can turn low-growth assets into high-growth portfolios.

What This Acquisition Means

Few companies illustrate the challenges of traditional software development in the AI era better than Miro. Bending Spoons' intervention is rich with symbolism: it represents the attempt by "weaker" humans to prove they possess a unique, irreplaceable capability in the face of massive technological disruption.

It is, in essence, a test of whether human ingenuity still drives progress.

This article is adapted from a piece originally published by Touzhong Wang (投中网), authored by Pu Fan (蒲凡).