Bending Spoons bought Miro for $1.36 billion, about 90% below the whiteboard darling’s 2021 peak valuation. If you use Miro, history says the next 12 months get interesting. Evernote users watched the same company take over and raise prices by 86% within months. Here’s the playbook for what happens next.
What actually happened
Bending Spoons bought Miro the way it buys everything: quietly, for real money, at a price that would’ve been unthinkable in 2021. The deal: $1.36 billion in cash, $1.79 billion equity value, for a company valued at $17.5 billion in late 2021. That’s a 92% haircut, and it’s not even their biggest bargain hunt this year. Airtable went for $1.28 billion last month after peaking above $11 billion.
Miro started in 2011 as RealtimeBoard, a digital whiteboard. Then COVID hit, remote teams needed somewhere to stick their virtual sticky notes, and Miro exploded from 5 million to 30 million users in about two years. Today it claims 100 million total users, 4 million paying, and $600 million in annual recurring revenue. The company rebranded itself an “AI innovation workspace,” with AI assistants, AI workflows, and connectors that pull context from GitHub, Jira, and Slack.
So Miro is profitable, growing, and sitting on $435 million in net cash. And it still sold at a 90% discount to its peak. Make of that what you will about the entire SaaS era.
The Bending Spoons playbook, documented
Here’s why users care who writes their software’s paycheck. Bending Spoons has a track record now, and it’s consistent enough that investigators have documented the pattern: acquire, cut most of the staff, raise prices, and simplify the free tier.
Look at the receipts:
| Acquired app | What happened after |
|---|---|
| Evernote | Personal plan jumped from $69.99 to $129.99 a year, roughly 86%. Free tier slashed. Around 250 staff cut. |
| WeTransfer | Plan to lay off about 75% of staff after the acquisition. |
| Komoot | Roughly three-quarters of original staff gone, followed by price increases. |
| Meetup | Acquired early 2024; price increases and feature changes followed. |
The Evernote one stings the most. Users who paid $69.99 a year woke up to a $129.99 renewal. Some hikes reported by users ran even higher. A follow-the-money investigation summed up the sequence as “a massive round of redundancies, followed by a price increase and radical changes to the way the app works.”
To be fair, there’s a reason Bending Spoons bought Miro: the model works. Revenue data at past acquisitions shows a smaller, angrier user base generating more money than before. Annoyed customers still paying is a business plan, apparently. And to their credit, the apps keep running. Evernote didn’t die. It just got expensive.
Why Miro is different (a little)
Miro isn’t a consumer afterthought like some past acquisitions. 90% of its revenue comes from businesses and enterprises, and enterprise buyers have contracts, procurement departments, and real migration muscle. Bending Spoons can’t double prices on a company whose IT team manages 5,000 seats without a conversation.
Also, Miro’s board and investors didn’t have to sell. A profitable company with $435 million in cash had options, which suggests the exit market for SaaS companies has gotten grim enough that cash today beat hypothetical IPO money tomorrow.
Still, the pressure on smaller customers is where the playbook usually shows up first. Freelancers, teachers, and small teams on free or cheap plans have the least negotiating power and the most tolerance-extraction potential. Watch that segment. That’s exactly why Bending Spoons bought Miro without a visible price worry: the free and cheap tiers were never the point.
What Miro users should do right now
Not leave. Just get ready, and do it in this order:
- Check your renewal date today. If you’re on a monthly plan and Miro matters to your work, consider switching to annual before any price changes land. Grandfathered rates are the cheapest rates you’ll ever have.
- Export your boards. Miro can export boards as PDFs and images. Do it for anything you’d cry about losing. Fifteen minutes of backup beats years of regret.
- Audit what you actually use. Open your account, count active boards and team members. If you’re paying for 10 seats and 3 people log in, that’s a downsizing opportunity regardless of what happens next.
- Shortlist two alternatives now, not during a crisis. FigJam, Canva’s whiteboards, and a handful of newer tools cover similar ground; our rundown of AI mind mapping tools is a good starting point for comparison shopping.
- Set a news alert for “Miro pricing.” The pattern at past acquisitions was redundancies first, pricing changes second. When the pricing announcement hits, you’ll have days, not months, to decide.
I ran through this exact checklist for my own workspace account last night. Two stale boards exported, three dead teammates removed, renewal flagged in my calendar. Took under 20 minutes.
The bigger lesson for anyone who uses software
The Miro deal is really a story about power. When a tool is central to how you work, the company behind it holds power over your workflow, your data, and eventually your wallet. This keeps happening across the industry, and the answer is boring but effective: keep your exports current and your exit path known.
Same logic applies everywhere, whether it’s a whiteboard app, an automation platform (we’ve covered the best Zapier alternatives for exactly this reason), or your AI tools. Portability is insurance. It costs a little now and saves a lot later.
Bending Spoons bought Miro to run it harder, not to kill it, and the AI features might even move faster under new ownership. Just don’t be surprised when the renewal email looks different. You heard it here first. The deal details are in TechCrunch’s report.
