# Bending Spoons Bought Miro. They Have a List With 1,000 More Names on It.

> Miro sold for about 2.3 times revenue, five weeks after Airtable went for 2.7x. Everyone will write about the fall from $17.5 billion. The multiple is the scarier number, and the list of who's next is public.

2026-09-13 · Tim Cadenbach · https://www.tcdev.de/blog/bending-spoons-bought-miro/

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On Thursday, Bending Spoons [agreed to buy Miro](https://investors.bendingspoons.com/newsroom/bending-spoons-agrees-to-acquire-miro) for $1.355 billion in cash. Miro is sitting at roughly $600 million in annual recurring revenue, nearly 90 percent of it from business and enterprise customers, close to four million paying users and 250,000 organisations. So the whole thing went for about 2.3 times revenue.

Five weeks before that, the same company [bought Airtable](https://techcrunch.com/2026/08/04/bending-spoons-to-buy-airtable-for-1-28b/) for $1.285 billion against roughly $480 million of ARR. About 2.7x.

Everyone is going to write about the fall from the $17.5 billion Miro was worth in late 2021, and fair enough, a 90 percent haircut makes a good headline. But the multiple is the number that actually kept me up. Miro is profitable, it's carrying $435 million of net cash (you can back that out of the $1.79 billion equity value against the $1.355 billion enterprise value), and it has 750 customers paying more than $100,000 a year each. That is by any normal reading a good software business, and it cleared at roughly two years of revenue.

## Two point three times revenue is what a healthy SaaS company is worth now

I wrote a while back that [SaaS the business model is quietly falling apart](https://www.tcdev.de/blog/everyone-says-saas-is-dead/) and I think this deal is the receipt, because the market has clearly repriced what a subscription revenue stream is worth in a world where everyone assumes the next model can rebuild a decent chunk of your product in a weekend.

The 2021 cohort raised at multiples that only ever made sense on a forward curve nobody hit. Airtable was worth over $11 billion at peak and sold at $1.285 billion. Miro was worth $17.5 billion and sold at $1.355 billion. Both of them did the layoffs, got the margins right, grew the enterprise share, did everything the board asked for....and the exit is still barely more than two years of revenue. There is no version of those cap tables where the late-stage money comes home, and anyone holding options struck against a $17.5 billion valuation is holding paper worth nothing at all.

And honestly, I don't think Miro's team did anything wrong. That's what makes it grim.

## So how many more of these are they going to buy?

This is the part people keep underestimating, because Bending Spoons told everyone the answer and published it in an SEC filing.

In their [F-1](https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/0002004711/000110465926071170/tm2613674-7_f1.htm) they say they've identified **more than 1,000 digital businesses**, private and public, representing around $400 billion in combined 2025 revenue, as potential targets. In 2025 alone they sourced over 2,500 opportunities, looked hard at about 200, and closed six. That's not a vague ambition on a slide, that's a pipeline with a conversion rate.

Then they went public on the Nasdaq on July 1 at $29 a share, popped 40 percent on day one, and now have real public currency to buy with instead of just debt and private commitments. Airtable was the first post-IPO deal and Miro is the second, five weeks later.

The bit I find genuinely funny, in a bleak way, is CEO Luca Ferrari's own framing in the filing: as AI lets them do more with fewer people, the scalability of the acquisition and transformation model should improve too. Which is a fancy way of saying that the cheaper it gets to run a software company with a skeleton crew, the more software companies you can afford to own. So AI is quietly making the roll-up of the 2021 cohort cheaper rather than competing that cohort out of existence, which is a much weirder outcome than the one everybody was predicting two years ago.

My guess is we see three to five more of these in the next twelve months, and at least one of them is a name you'd have called untouchable in 2022. Notion, Figma and Canva are too expensive and still growing. But Asana, Miro's neighbours in the collaboration aisle, anything public and trading below its cash-adjusted revenue multiple, that's the shopping list.

## What this actually means for Miro, based on what happened to the others

Neither company has said anything about Miro's 13 offices or its staff, which in this specific case tells you quite a lot, because the pattern is well documented by now.

At Evernote, headcount went from 341 at acquisition to about 60 by the end of 2024. That's 82 percent. At WeTransfer, [roughly 75 percent of staff](https://techcrunch.com/2026/07/05/what-is-bending-spoons-everything-to-know-about-aols-acquirer/) were cut within weeks of the deal closing. At Brightcove it was more than 85 percent of around 200 people. Komoot lost about three quarters of its team. When [Vimeo's layoffs landed in January](https://techcrunch.com/2026/01/22/vimeo-starts-layoffs-after-acquisition-by-bending-spoons), one engineer said almost everyone went, including the entire video team, at a video company. And per their own filing, AOL, Eventbrite and Tractive brought 1,830 employees into the group, of whom they expect only a few hundred to still be there after the 2026 transformation.

Then there's the pricing side, which matters more to you if you're a user rather than an employee. Evernote's free plan ended up capped at 50 notes. WeTransfer's free tier got limited to 10 transfers a month. Both products still exist and both of them stopped being the thing people recommended.

So if you run workshops on Miro, here's what I'd expect. The free tier gets squeezed first, because it's the top of the funnel and the cheapest thing to monetise. Enterprise contracts get renewed at higher numbers on renewal date rather than repriced overnight, because that 90 percent enterprise revenue is the whole asset and you don't spook it. Support gets slower. Feature velocity on anything that isn't core whiteboarding goes to roughly zero, and all those adjacent bets Miro made (the AI canvas stuff, the process mapping, the product development platform ambitions) quietly stop shipping.

The board you drew last Tuesday will still open in three years. That's actually the Bending Spoons promise, and it's not nothing.

## Where I've changed my mind on them a bit

I used to describe this outfit as strip-mining, and I'm less comfortable with that word than I was.

Look at the alternative endings for a company like Evernote or AOL. Wind-down, a fire sale to someone who kills the product in six months, or an acquisition by a big platform that absorbs the team and shuts the tool. Bending Spoons keeps the products running, keeps paying customers served, and by their own account has never sold off a material business they bought. There's a real argument that the 2021 cohort hired for a growth curve that never arrived, and that somebody was always going to have to do the arithmetic. They're just doing it in public and fast rather than over four quiet quarters of attrition.

That doesn't make the layoffs less brutal for the people in them. But "efficient owner of mature software" is a legitimate business, and pretending otherwise is a bit dishonest, especially when the founders are voluntarily reinvesting $295 million of their proceeds back into Bending Spoons stock. They think it goes up.

## The uncomfortable question for the rest of us

If your company's planning, retros, roadmaps and half your institutional memory live inside one vendor's cloud, and that vendor is a 2021 unicorn that never grew into its valuation, then you're inventory rather than a customer. Not today, and probably not next quarter, but on someone's list of 1,000.

I'd go find out two things this week. Whether your critical tools have a working export that produces something you could actually read without them, and what your contract says about price changes on renewal after a change of control. Most people have never read that clause. It's usually short and it usually doesn't protect you.

The thing I still can't get my head around is the shape of it. A Nasdaq-listed Italian holding company is systematically buying up the collaboration software the entire western tech industry runs on, one deal every five weeks, and the market is cheering because the numbers work. I wrote about [EA going to a Saudi fund and Jared Kushner](https://www.tcdev.de/blog/ea-55-billion-buyout/) a few weeks ago and thought that was the strange one.

Anyway. Who's next, you think?