Invest1 publisher3 min readPublished
Bending Spoons buys Miro at about 2.3 times its recurring revenue
Bending Spoons is buying its second discounted collaboration platform in five weeks. Some Miro shareholders are putting part of their proceeds into stock of a buyer the public market has just marked up.
The Investor · Invest desk
What happened
- Bending Spoons agreed to buy Miro in an all-cash transaction valuing the online whiteboard business at $1.355 billion in enterprise terms.
- The equity price of roughly $1.79 billion is about 90% below the $17.5 billion valuation Miro carried in January 2022, at the height of the remote-work funding boom.
- Both boards have approved the agreement, which the parties expect to close in the fourth quarter of 2026 pending regulatory approval, with the companies operating separately until then.
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Why it matters
- cost The January 2022 syndicate carries the difference. ICONIQ Growth and Accel led $400 million into Miro at $17.5 billion; the whole company's equity now clears at $1.79 billion, only 4.5 times that single round.
- constraint Bending Spoons says it has never sold a business in the decade it has run this strategy, so Miro and Airtable stop being candidate IPO comparables for collaboration software, and the buyer's own stock becomes the only public read on their economics.
- precedent Two of the pandemic era's best-funded collaboration tools have now been priced by the same buyer inside five weeks. Any board weighing a sale of a 2021-vintage software asset will be shown those two numbers first.
- contradiction Whether this is a Miro-specific price or a category price is unsettled in the source material, and the answer decides whether other founders should treat two to three times ARR as their own likely outcome.
The 90% figure is a price measured against a price [3]. Set Miro's January 2022 mark of $17.5 billion against today's roughly $600 million of annual recurring revenue and the answer is 29 times revenue [4]. No one paid 29 times in 2022. The disclosure gives the current revenue level and no comparable figure for the quarter when ICONIQ Growth and Accel led the $400 million round [4]. So how much of the drop is multiple compression and how much is a far larger business changing hands stays unresolved.
The numbers do support the 2026 multiple. Bending Spoons is paying $1.355 billion of enterprise value against that $600 million of ARR, which is about 2.3 times revenue [1][9][1]. On the $1.79 billion equity number it is about three times [2][2]. The gap between the two implies around $435 million of net cash inside Miro [3].
The reinvestment term is the more interesting puzzle. Certain Miro shareholders will put $295 million of their proceeds into newly issued Bending Spoons stock [5], which is 16.5% of the $1.79 billion equity value [5]. They are taking paper in a company the public market has just marked up. Bending Spoons listed on Nasdaq on July 1 at $29 a share and now trades in the low $50s, with the stock up as much as 8% on the Miro news [13]. Call the low $50s $52. That is 79% above the IPO price, and applied to the $18.4 billion listing valuation it implies roughly $33 billion of equity [14][7].
Airtable, which closed on September 4, went at about $2.25 billion of equity value against an $11 billion peak in 2021, a discount of 79.5% [7][6]. Miro's is deeper. Luca Ferrari, Bending Spoons' chief executive and co-founder, said the company plans to "invest substantially in the fundamentals that its customers value," naming performance, reliability and functionality as priorities once the deal closes [11]. Andrey Khusid, Miro's co-founder and chief executive, described the company as "an AI-first workspace that teams run their most important work through" [10].
Miro's growth rate would break the reset reading. The announcement does not carry it. Nearly 90% of the $600 million comes from business and enterprise customers. The 750-plus accounts paying over $100,000 a year account for at least $75 million of that, 12.5% of the total, and the four million paying users average about $150 each [9][8][9]. If that revenue is compounding quickly, 2.3 times trailing revenue is a cheap entry price and says little about what the category is worth. Two deals by one Italian buyer in five weeks tell you what Bending Spoons will pay and leave what a contested auction would have produced unknown [8]. The Miro agreement is not expected to close until the fourth quarter of 2026, pending regulatory approval [6].
What to watch
- Regulatory approval and the fourth-quarter 2026 close, with Miro and Bending Spoons operating separately until then.
- Any disclosure of Miro's ARR growth rate or margin, which is the figure that decides whether 2.3 times trailing revenue was cheap.
- A third Bending Spoons acquisition: another deal in the two-to-three times ARR band would show the price is the buyer's discipline, a higher one would show competition returning.