Bending Spoons buying Miro for $1.355B(investors.bendingspoons.com) |
Bending Spoons buying Miro for $1.355B(investors.bendingspoons.com) |
Great whiteboarding tool though.
People should try Kinopio.
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.
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!!!” ?
Incredible reponsiveness, UI/UX, and embeddable rich media functionality. Was like Hypercard mixed with whiteboarding and an incredibly traversable canvas.
I don't care for or use any of the AI features.
I hope the price doesn't go up dramatically.
Left in May 2023, before they shut the US/Chile offices. The sequence was pretty consistent: cut every vendor they could (Zoom disappeared overnight), get to profitable on costs, then raise prices on lock-in.
Personal went from ~$70/year to $130 pretty fast.
The product is still alive; the company that built it is not. They were effective. It was also obvious early that most of us were not part of the long-term plan.
I wrote it up here:
https://alexkras.com/my-last-six-months-at-evernote-after-be...
> 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).
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.
i'm just waiting to wake up to news of Luca Ferrari buying Inter Milan like some old world Mark Walter
Never underestimate what other people find useful that you do not.
I'll sort of miss Harvest, but I'm acclimating myself to the idea of just writing my own timesheet software.
No hold on... Adobe is probably already secretly owned by BS given their business practices.
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.
I'm curious to know if it was ever as embedded as, say, Jira is, in some companies.
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)
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...
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...
Seems like you answered your own question. Obviously there are customers and a revenue stream (I don’t even know what micro is).
As many share, I used Miro and found it quite nice.
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.
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.