Bending Spoons buying Miro for $1.355B

Posted by andygcook 8 hours ago

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Comments

Comment by jtwaleson 7 hours ago

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.

Comment by katspaugh 7 hours ago

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

People should try Kinopio.

Comment by jtwaleson 7 hours ago

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.

Comment by SenHeng 5 hours ago

Whimsical is my favourite tool for that.

Comment by altairprime 4 hours ago

Miro was always fine to use at work. It’s no Visio desktop or OmniGraffle but it wasn’t offensive and I only somewhat preferred LucidChart over it.

Comment by senko 7 hours ago

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

Comment by pavlov 7 hours ago

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.

Comment by cameldrv 7 hours ago

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%.

Comment by altairprime 4 hours ago

Did they worsen the product other than charging non-bargain prices?

Comment by 0xbadcafebee 3 hours ago

You can't really migrate off it, it has strong vendor lock-in

Comment by Smeevy 5 hours ago

My Harvest renewal was going to be a 1,400% increase. I just cancelled the service yesterday after 20 years. While I was clicking through the "Yes, I am sure" buttons, it got down to a mere 300% increase. I wouldn't pay that purely on principle.

I'll sort of miss Harvest, but I'm acclimating myself to the idea of just writing my own timesheet software.

Comment by DidntUseIt 8 hours ago

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!!!” ?

Comment by piltdownman 7 hours ago

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.

Comment by joezydeco 7 hours ago

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.

Comment by altairprime 4 hours ago

That’s not Power User, that’s Lazy User: just like how Agile tries to offload the work of managing ticket statuses onto developers, their demand offloaded the work of recording post-it note outcomes onto attendees.

Comment by joezydeco 3 hours ago

Funny thing, this person is also our SAFe scrum master. So double the laziness in one package.

Comment by altairprime 2 hours ago

I often saw the same pattern in engineers who hated Agile and Jira, but then would spend weeks coding automation to avoid one-time drudgery that would have taken a tenth of the time to complete. So I am being careful not to judge “Lazy”, because that’s a normal tendency for any lifeform with energetic constraints, as itself inherently wrong — but it absolutely can be optimized to personal excess at group cost, as I would judge this refusal to use in-person paper tools to be.

Comment by sidewndr46 6 hours ago

That's the advantage of being in office I guess

Comment by Centigonal 7 hours ago

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

Comment by ricardobeat 7 hours ago

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.

Comment by tomwphillips 7 hours ago

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.

Comment by justincormack 7 hours ago

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

Comment by tnolet 7 hours ago

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.

Comment by senko 7 hours ago

> 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).

Comment by The_Blade 7 hours ago

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

Comment by saberience 7 hours ago

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.

Comment by 0xbadcafebee 7 hours ago

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.

Comment by deadbunny 7 hours ago

Can they just buy Atlassian.

Comment by throwa356262 7 hours ago

And Adobe?

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

Comment by oathvz 6 hours ago

FATALITY - in Mortal Kombat voice

Comment by leugim 7 hours ago

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

Comment by kslambert 7 hours ago

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.

Comment by bfeynman 7 hours ago

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.

Comment by tnolet 7 hours ago

Overheard: "The Italian exit"

Comment by nness 7 hours ago

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

Comment by The_Blade 7 hours ago

and others like Aol. and Eventbrite, but where it really hit me was Evernote. i tried to cancel and then Bending Spoons (BS for short) tried to charge me several times at a subscription 5 times the cost. i think something about pre-auth tokens across the sea on a PayPal account almost old enough to run for the House of Representatives might have had something to do with it, but IIRC BS has already had cash money rulings against it for shady-to-illegal billing practices

its reward? successful IPO. here is an Economist article from a couple months ago: https://www.economist.com/business/2026/07/01/can-bending-sp...

Comment by KellyCriterion 7 hours ago

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

Comment by _joel 7 hours ago

Didn't know Uri Geller was an investor now.

Comment by fuzzfactor 7 hours ago

It's a mere imitation but they do deform the target using their own mentality so there is that.

Comment by m000 7 hours ago

Don't do it Fedon!

Comment by b3ing 3 hours ago

Well there goes that tool down the dumpster. Meetup has been nothing but finding ways to raise prices and revenue and not about building the site to be better, as it went downhill since like 2015/16

Comment by arnvald 7 hours ago

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...

Comment by senko 7 hours ago

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

Comment by lbreakjai 2 hours ago

Do they even have the moat to pull the same sort of playbook with Miro? We used to use it for remote retros and whiteboarding, we ended up not renewing because we were already paying for Lucid and there was little added value.

I'm curious to know if it was ever as embedded as, say, Jira is, in some companies.

Comment by senko 2 hours ago

Maybe not to the same extent. In a company I worked with recently they used it a lot but didn't store data in it, meaning there was very little lock-in: mostly inertia/convenience.

If BS slightly raise the price and ruthlessly cut costs (think - leave just a skeleton crew to keep it running), the calculation may make sense even if there's slow churn in the users and no special lock in.

(disclaimer: pure outsider speculation on my part)

Comment by tencentshill 8 hours ago

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

Comment by tehlike 8 hours ago

Partially, but why is that a problem?

Comment by horsawlarway 7 hours ago

[dead]

Comment by zipy124 7 hours ago

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

Comment by denverllc 7 hours ago

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

Comment by yborg 7 hours ago

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.

Comment by everfrustrated 5 hours ago

Atlassian is too large. Also atlassian has been doing the same growing by acquisition for a long while themselves.

Comment by zipy124 7 hours ago

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

Comment by pjm331 7 hours ago

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

Comment by 627467 2 hours ago

I'm curious that every time BS buys up some we hear about all the criticism of them and never the funding/management model thay has powered saas for the past 15-20years.

Its not like they are making high payout in the purchases. They are snatching assets off weak hands (management, investors) who has no interest or idea on how to make their operations work.

Comment by adamas 7 hours ago

As a Miro user (by force): why?

Comment by VladVladikoff 7 hours ago

>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).

Comment by jszymborski 7 hours ago

Here I was thinking they were talking about the video player

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

Comment by elAhmo 7 hours ago

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.

Comment by tonyedgecombe 7 hours ago

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.

Comment by vira28 5 hours ago

Is Bending Spoons the PE for startups?

Comment by Ekaros 5 hours ago

Yes. Buying companies at their actual value and then optimising the and extracting value they can. Considering lot of these startups and how they have acted I don't even consider them anyway evil.

Comment by fakedang 3 hours ago

More like the vulture PE for startups.

It's a solid business model though - get another team to take the risk and develop the app and user base, then when times are tough, buy them out, wring them dry and suck out all the value. In the meantime, don't do any extra feature development on the apps, just run them on maintenance mode with a lean dev team and zero support.

Comment by knes 7 hours ago

Notion is next

Comment by danielrmay 7 hours ago

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.

Comment by 0gs 7 hours ago

is the $100K ARR quote a typo?

Comment by elAhmo 7 hours ago

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

Comment by tnolet 7 hours ago

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.

Comment by 0gs 6 hours ago

yeah this was a misread of the surrounding context, my bad

Comment by camillomiller 7 hours ago

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