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Bending Spoons buying Miro for $1.355B

57 points andygcook 1 hour ago 48 comments

tencentshill 1 hour ago | parent

Is that financed by all the other companies they extract from?

tehlike 55 minutes ago | parent

Partially, but why is that a problem?

zipy124 48 minutes ago | parent

They are heavily debt financed I believe, almost $5 billion worth last I checked.

denverllc 38 minutes ago | parent

So they really are like the Private Equity of the software world.

zipy124 33 minutes ago | parent

Yes but focussing more on long-term ownership, as opposed to the usual turn-around and flip or asset stripping methodology.

yborg 22 minutes ago | parent

More like following the Computer Associates model, a tale as old as time. Find a mature platform with a captive user population with a fat, lazy management team, buy them out, slash headcount, and open the taps. Someone in the thread mentioned Atlassian, that is a perfect target for this kind of strategy.

DidntUseIt 55 minutes ago | parent

Tried Miro once.

Wasn’t a whiteboard replacement.

Wasn’t design software.

Wasn’t a PM tool.

Even when the Miro power users would bust it out in meetings, it was always so painful to watch.

I don’t know what the point of Miro really was. There was a time Figma was doing something similar (FigJam), so maybe there was a trend for a sec.

No idea why or how it’s worth over a billion dollars.

Anyone reading this going “Noooo not Miro!!!” ?

ricardobeat 50 minutes ago | parent

It was a great whiteboarding tool for teams. Planning, research, meetings, standups etc. IMO they tried to cater to too many use cases at once, missed the AI train, and focused too hard on enterprise, which hurt the product a lot.

saberience 49 minutes ago | parent

I personally loved Miro, probably one of the best design tools I've ever used.

My old company used it across the board for basically, everything. Engineering flow diagrams, UI prototyping, team retrospectives.

I personally often used it for creating diagrams that I would later insert into slide decks.

It was basically a swiss-army knife type tool which could be applied in so many situations.

Deeply saddened that it's going to Bendingspoons, where companies go to die.

tomwphillips 49 minutes ago | parent

Yeah, me. I've used it every day for years. With a hybrid/remote team it is a fantastic alternative to a physical whiteboard. Whole team uses it.

I don't care for or use any of the AI features.

I hope the price doesn't go up dramatically.

justincormack 32 minutes ago | parent

The price will go up dramatically, that is part of how Bending Spoons works.

senko 49 minutes ago | parent

> Wasn’t a whiteboard replacement.

> Wasn’t a PM tool.

I know a lot of people who used it for one or both of these. Also for architecture/system design (ie. not UI - although I guess some used it for user journey or wireframing).

0xbadcafebee 47 minutes ago | parent

There are a whole lot of people out there who use Miro for all of their documentation, planning, troubleshooting, etc, in multiple roles. It's a primary tool for many people, like a word processor/sheets/slides on steroids. And the moat they have makes it nearly impossible to take your data elsewhere. It is very entrenched.

Never underestimate what other people find useful that you do not.

tnolet 47 minutes ago | parent

For remote companies, it is quite useful and really a white board replacement. We use(d) it for customer research, retros, design exploration, architecture diagrams, data modelling and a ton more. Figma (Jam) is way too designer focused.

piltdownman 24 minutes ago | parent

It's LucidSpark for non-masochists. It's Parabol for power-users. It's possibly the greatest 'roll your own' tool for workshopping and blue-sky planning to hit mass-appeal without feature and subscription bloat.

Incredible reponsiveness, UI/UX, and embeddable rich media functionality. Was like Hypercard mixed with whiteboarding and an incredibly traversable canvas.

Centigonal 18 minutes ago | parent

Miro is a great tool - it's not a $20B company, but it's a great utility.

joezydeco 14 minutes ago | parent

My best experience was a large meeting I had recently, in a well equipped conference room with actual whiteboards and stacks of post-it notes and the Power Miro User in the room insisted we all bring laptops and work on the boards online. Jesus Christ.

The_Blade 9 minutes ago | parent

i'm forever chasing the dragon of cocktail napkin + physical stickies + Balsamiq, and have never even used Miro, and even i let out a "ohhhh no" in a welp, should i just go back to bed tone seeing this

i'm just waiting to wake up to news of Luca Ferrari buying Inter Milan like some old world Mark Walter

senko 48 minutes ago | parent

Bending Spoons is on a buying spree!

Miro acquired my startup back in '21[0], so this is bittersweet as our users will be (eventually) affected by this. Founders and employees at Miro definitely deserve to cash out for their hard work and it's unclear (ie. not publicly known) if they will since this is a 10x down round.

Also weird that they had to sell - they were one of the most established (visual) collaboration platforms out there. I'd be keen on learning about the inside story if it ever gets public.

BS is known for aggressive management of companies they acquire, optimizing for cash flow and revenue, firing most/all of the original team, etc. Their acquisitions before Miro include Airtable, Eventbrite, AOL, Vimeo, Meetup, Evernote ... for at least a few of those, my direct experience with the product afterwards or in chats with their users, the platforms does get enshittified.

Hope that's not a deal here.

[0] https://blog.senko.net/the-story-of-a-web-whiteboard

camillomiller 48 minutes ago | parent

Another dead tool whose users will be sucked dry. Vampire equity at is best

tnolet 46 minutes ago | parent

Overheard: "The Italian exit"

adamas 43 minutes ago | parent

As a Miro user (by force): why?

VladVladikoff 39 minutes ago | parent

>by force

Seems like you answered your own question. Obviously there are customers and a revenue stream (I don’t even know what micro is).

0gs 40 minutes ago | parent

is the $100K ARR quote a typo?

tnolet 34 minutes ago | parent

Why would it be a typo? Miro was doing $600M ARR, some of their customers were paying them $100k+ a year. That is totally normal. It would be weird if they did not have such customers.

elAhmo 33 minutes ago | parent

NO, this is referring to more than 750 customers with (large) $100K ARR, not Miro's ARR in total.

deadbunny 40 minutes ago | parent

Can they just buy Atlassian.

throwa356262 8 minutes ago | parent

And Adobe?

No hold on... Adobe is probably already secretly owned by BS given their business practices.

pjm331 38 minutes ago | parent

miro is my go-to for putting together diagrams for slide decks, but after having tried using it to actually work on things a few times, i've just come to the conclusion that actually virtual whiteboards are a bad UX for most things, inevitably you spend more time organizing the board than actually getting work done

elAhmo 36 minutes ago | parent

BS is slowly but steadily growing their userbase. Knowhing how did it go for their other purchases, of which I was using many (Komoot, Eventbrite, Meetup), not a single one has avoided constant nags of prompting for upgrades and dark patterns, so this will most likely end up in a similar way.

As many share, I used Miro and found it quite nice.

tonyedgecombe 26 minutes ago | parent

Komoot is particularly bad, I paid for a lifetime license but now they are gating new features behind a subscription. I think it's time to find something else.

jszymborski 35 minutes ago | parent

Here I was thinking they were talking about the video player

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miro_(video_software)

_joel 31 minutes ago | parent

Didn't know Uri Geller was an investor now.

nness 30 minutes ago | parent

Isn't Bending Spoons the one who acquired Vimeo then fired all but a skeleton staff?

KellyCriterion 23 minutes ago | parent

....yes, and not only at Vimeo with this playbook....

leugim 28 minutes ago | parent

2xARR is extremely low, I'd like to know why they sold. After being valued at 17B selling for close to ~2B is interesting.

bfeynman 21 minutes ago | parent

Like Airtable - they probably started seeing revenue growth/acceleration plummeting due to vibecoding being able to replace the product and are pulling plug early instead of letting it grind out to 0.

kslambert 9 minutes ago | parent

2x ARR is low... But if they are making $600ARR and barely breaking even, enterprise and growth rates are slowing, or customer churn is high then it isn’t as healthy a business as it looks on paper. Especially if they don't have a new play in a highly competitive space where companies are looking to cut costs.

jtwaleson 27 minutes ago | parent

I have some friends there. Morale in the company was very very low. There were multiple rounds of lay-offs and management went AI crazy. They were desperate to live up to their extreme valuation from 2022. "We have to be the future of work" etc. Now the exit was 10x lower than their max valuation.

Great whiteboarding tool though.

senko 23 minutes ago | parent

Shit that sucks. They'll probably all be let go if BS do their usual thing.

katspaugh 17 minutes ago | parent

What’s great about it? I shudder every time some product manager sends out a miro link.

People should try Kinopio.

jtwaleson 13 minutes ago | parent

It's a best-in-class real time collaboration board. It's also a decent general purpose diagramming tool, but if you're using it for creating software architecture diagrams or product flows, there are better tools for that.

pavlov 19 minutes ago | parent

They bought Airtable last month for a similarly distressed valuation.

The SaaSpocalypse has hit the post-Covid highfliers, and Bending Spoons is the grim reaper.

I don't suppose there is any big synergy hopes here. They're just identifying companies with relatively sticky enterprise accounts and will milk those.

cameldrv 15 minutes ago | parent

If you’re using it, you should plan to migrate off ASAP. I’ve been a long time user of Harvest, and after Bending Spoons acquired it, they increased our pricing by 800%.

arnvald 15 minutes ago | parent

Wow, this is quite shocking. I used to work in Amsterdam and Miro used to be one of more well-known companies there. A few of my friends worked there at some point.

I used it quite heavily at one company. I found it a bit bloated, but it was ok, and I didn't have to jump between one tool and another, it allowed me to draw some diagrams, do retrospective, share ideas with others.

Clearly the pandemic skyrocketed their valuation to a level they couldn't maintain...

knes 12 minutes ago | parent

Notion is next

danielrmay 5 minutes ago | parent

Wow, this might seal the deal for "SaaS-pocalypse". I imagine the upside is high for Spoons considering the wealth of data and a well-oiled product enshittification playbook.