Remote collaboration platform Miro acquired for $1.79B, 90% below its 2022 peak valuation

In recent years, one date has been repeatedly cited in venture capital and startup reporting: 2021, the year of massive U.S. dollar liquidity — a term now synonymous with disaster.

The prevailing consensus is that the flood of cheap money turned the primary market into a speculative paradise, with hot money flowing freely and valuations soaring. It trapped a wave of venture capital funds at inflated highs while minting a generation of so-called "pseudo-unicorns" — startups with little substance behind their billion-dollar price tags. The short-term consequence was the capital winter of 2022–2023, a period of liquidity drought. The longer-term fallout: these pseudo-unicorns either slashed their valuations to survive or collapsed entirely, wiping out investors' bets in the process.

Yet even pessimists could hardly have predicted that the damage from the era of loose money would persist into the second half of 2026 — a timeline that, on the surface, has been propped up by the AI narrative.

The Miro Acquisition: A Staggering Markdown

Recently, the technology company Bending Spoons announced its intention to acquire the remote collaboration platform Miro 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 of the deal stands at about $1.79 billion.

Miro is a textbook example of the inflated unicorns born during the liquidity boom. In January 2022, the company closed a Series C funding round at a valuation of $17.5 billion (approximately RMB 117 billion).

The $1.79 billion equity value represents just one-tenth of that Series C valuation. In four years, Miro's valuation has plummeted by 90% — a super-unicorn that lost its "super" and was left with only "unicorn."

A Product of the "Cloud Era"

To be fair, lumping Miro together with the投机-driven "pseudo-unicorns" of the liquidity era is somewhat unjust. Miro was, by all accounts, a team that genuinely built a product. The core team developed the product prototype as early as 2012. Founders Andrey Khusid and Oleg Shardin were not serial entrepreneurs chasing trends.

Before founding Miro, they co-ran Vitamin Group, a well-known design studio specializing in website and app design. The idea for Miro emerged from a real industry pain point: as Vitamin Group's reputation grew, so did the number of out-of-town clients, making communication of design requirements cumbersome. In 2012, Khusid and Shardin launched Miro — originally named RealtimeBoard — as a real-time whiteboard for remote collaboration, rooted in genuine industry insight.

However, it is equally fair to say that Miro was a major beneficiary of the liquidity boom.

The Slow Burn: 2012–2019

After the initial product launch in 2012, Miro remained "small and beautiful" for a long time. Its positioning was simple: a tool to help designers align with clients on requirements. Khusid later admitted in interviews that the team initially didn't even intend to build a standalone product — their goal was to "embed a real-time whiteboard supporting cloud collaboration into a browser."

With such a laid-back approach, Miro didn't complete its first institutional funding round until around 2017, raising just $1.3 million from a little-known firm, Altair Capital.

In November 2018, Miro finally entered Silicon Valley's radar. Silicon Valley heavyweight Accel led Miro's Series A round, totaling $25 million. By then, seed funding had helped Miro achieve initial market traction, with 2 million users and approximately 8,000 enterprise customers, including notable names like Netflix, Twitter, Hubspot, and Airbnb. Yet even then, the team conservatively positioned itself as a "real-time whiteboard for remote collaboration."

The Pandemic Inflection Point: 2020

Then came 2020, and the world changed overnight.

As the pandemic swept the globe, people were forced to reduce physical contact — but life had to go on. Demand for remote collaboration 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 an overnight sensation. In April 2020, the company closed a Series B round of $50 million, with existing investor Accel joined by another active Silicon Valley VC, Iconiq. Notably, NBA star Stephen Curry also participated as a super angel investor. This was Miro's first real moment as a "star project," and its ambitions began to grow.

In the Series B press release, financial media no longer described Miro as a "whiteboard." Instead, they framed it as a platform — "not a lightweight plugin for collaboration like Zoom or Microsoft Teams," but rather "an integrated platform for many different office tools." Khusid's language also shifted subtly: "From the beginning, our philosophy was to build a real-time collaboration platform. The concept of a platform is very important because we want people to build on top of our product."

From a short-term data perspective, this pivot was correct. By April 2020, Miro had grown from 2 million users and 8,000 paying customers at the end of 2018 to 5 million users and over 20,000 paying customers.

But a company's fate depends not only on its own efforts but also on understanding the broader historical context.

The Peak: Series C at $17.5 Billion

In January 2022, Miro closed its Series C round, raising $400 million — more than five times the total capital it had raised in all previous rounds combined. The valuation jump was even more staggering: Miro was valued at $17.5 billion (RMB 117 billion) in the Series C. According to Pitchbook, Miro's valuation in the Series B was just $750 million (RMB 50 billion) — meaning it had surged 23x in less than two years.

Business growth was also explosive. By early 2022, Miro claimed 30 million users, with nearly every company in the Fortune 100 as a customer. Twenty of those Fortune 100 companies had signed annual contracts worth over $1 million.

But the revenue picture told a different story. In 2021, Miro's revenue was $300 million, meaning its $17.5 billion valuation represented 58x revenue — a figure that clearly defied rational financial logic.

Whether by design or by accident, Miro also chose to expand aggressively in sync with market euphoria. In the 12 months before the Series C, Miro doubled its headcount to over 1,000 employees. It opened offices in 11 cities, including Berlin, Munich, Tokyo, London, and others, transforming itself into a physically "global company." Khusid proudly described this strategy as "building the plane while flying it."

After the Series C, Miro began acquiring to fulfill its "platform" vision. In June 2022, it spent approximately $250–300 million to acquire Around, a video collaboration platform, in an attempt to compete directly with Zoom.

Other extravagant moves included relocating its global headquarters in Amsterdam to a 32,496-square-foot (approx. 3,019 sqm) building — a certified historical landmark built in the 1920s, designed by renowned architect Pieter Lucas Marnette, a representative of the Amsterdam School. The building is the only one directly facing the water on the famous Stadhouderskade in central Amsterdam.

In short, Miro had bet everything on the "tomorrow will be better" narrative, leaving itself little room for error — let alone the shock of the GPT moment in the second half of 2022.

The Fall: From Peak to Distress

Starting in the second half of 2022, a confluence of factors — the waning pandemic, the end of loose monetary policy, the GPT moment, and the rise of new tools like Figma and Canva — quickly turned the tide for these cloud-era beneficiaries.

In the public markets, once-high-flying unicorns like Zoom, Asana, and Monday.com saw their price-to-earnings ratios collapse from peak levels of 119x, 89x, and 84x to just 3.3x, 5.2x, and 8.5x by September 2023.

Miro was not immune. In February 2023, the company began layoffs and cut unnecessary operating expenses. In a public letter, CEO Khusid acknowledged that the company had expanded aggressively during a "special period" and now needed to "adapt to a changing environment." In 2024, Miro conducted another round of layoffs, cutting 18% of its workforce.

Today, Miro's user base has largely plateaued at 100 million total users and 4 million paying users. According to data released by acquirer Bending Spoons, Miro's current ARR (Annual Recurring Revenue) is approximately $600 million, with 90% coming from enterprise customers. Based on this figure, Bending Spoons' acquisition price of $1.36 billion represents just 2.3x ARR.

Bending Spoons: Software's "Prometheus Project"

If Miro is a prime specimen for studying the era of loose money, then the buyer — Bending Spoons — is likely to become a prime specimen for studying 2026.

I used the term "technology company" to describe Bending Spoons at the beginning of this article, but that's only because I struggled to find a better word. As I wrote in a previous piece, the rise of AI is not just about improving efficiency — it is fundamentally restructuring the production processes and industrial structures we once knew. This creates long-term possibilities for progress, but in the short term, it inevitably produces a large number of companies on the verge of being left behind, unsure of how to pivot.

Jeff Bezos responded by assembling a $700 billion fund called the "Prometheus Project" to acquire traditional manufacturing companies severely impacted by AI and modernize them. Bending Spoons can be seen as the software industry's equivalent of the Prometheus Project.

Founded in 2013 in Italy, Bending Spoons specializes in acquiring "old software companies" and revitalizing them through various transformations and enhancements. Its notable acquisitions include AOL, Eventbrite, and Vimeo. Two cases stand out:

• Evernote (the international version): Acquired in 2023 after years of losses. By 2025, after two years of operation, revenue had grown approximately 30% compared to 2023, and average revenue per active user had increased by 150%.
• Remini (a photo-editing app): According to Bending Spoons, five years after acquisition, monthly active users had grown more than 5x, revenue more than 9x, and average revenue per user had increased by about 50%.

What's more remarkable is that while Bezos' plan relies on AI to revive old companies, Bending Spoons — though it does incorporate AI — treats AI as just one ordinary component of its playbook. Strictly speaking, their transformation approach has little to do with technology at all. Their core philosophy boils down to one sentence: A small, highly autonomous team of top talent will always outperform a bloated organization.

In a podcast, Bending Spoons co-founder Francesco Patarnello shared three criteria for acquisition targets:

1. Can our platform add real value? — For example, by helping attract talent, turning data into insights, or bringing in new users.
2. Is the revenue scale large enough? — The company would rather do fewer, larger deals each year than send a 50-person team to overhaul a company with only $20 million in annual revenue.
3. Is the revenue predictable? — Note: not whether growth is fast, but whether it is predictable.

This approach has made Bending Spoons one of the most talked-about phenomena of the year. On July 3, 2025, Bending Spoons went public on the Nasdaq, reaching a market capitalization of up to $25 billion (approximately RMB 167.7 billion). At the time, 20VC ran a segment praising Bending Spoons as a landmark "anti-AI IPO," because the company is essentially "a collection of 20-year-old software assets." The fact that it successfully listed and saw its stock price surge proved that AI is not the only path to growth. By "slightly fixing the product, improving the user experience, and repricing," there is a real opportunity to "package low-growth assets into high-growth portfolios."

What the Miro Acquisition Means

From this perspective, Bending Spoons' acquisition of Miro is highly anticipated. Few companies are better suited than Miro to illustrate the predicament of traditional software development in the AI era. The entire rescue process is rich with symbolic meaning. At the very least, it represents an attempt by "weaker" humans — in the face of massive technological disruption — to prove that there is a unique, irreplaceable capability that technology cannot replicate: that humanity still drives progress.

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