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Bending Spoons buying Miro for $1.355B
- vira28 23d agoIs Bending Spoons the PE for startups?
- Ekaros 23d agoYes. 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.
- fakedang 23d agoMore 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.
- tencentshill 23d agoIs that financed by all the other companies they extract from?
- tehlike 23d agoPartially, but why is that a problem?
- horsawlarway 23d ago[dead]
- zipy124 23d agoThey are heavily debt financed I believe, almost $5 billion worth last I checked.
- denverllc 23d agoSo they really are like the Private Equity of the software world.
- zipy124 23d agoYes but focussing more on long-term ownership, as opposed to the usual turn-around and flip or asset stripping methodology.
- yborg 23d agoMore 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.
- everfrustrated 23d agoAtlassian is too large. Also atlassian has been doing the same growing by acquisition for a long while themselves.
- nunez 23d agoca got out-ca'ed when broadcom (avago) bought them
- DidntUseIt 23d agoTried 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 23d agoIt 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 23d agoI 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 23d agoYeah, 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 23d agoThe price will go up dramatically, that is part of how Bending Spoons works.
- dserodio 23d ago
- senko 23d agoBending 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 https://blog.senko.net/the-story-of-a-web-whiteboard
- lbreakjai 23d agoDo 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.
- senko 23d agoMaybe 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)
- nunez 23d agobs would not have acquired them if they did
- camillomiller 23d agoAnother dead tool whose users will be sucked dry. Vampire equity at is best
- tnolet 23d agoOverheard: "The Italian exit"
- adamas 23d agoAs a Miro user (by force): why?
- VladVladikoff 23d 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).
- 0gs 23d agois the $100K ARR quote a typo?
- tnolet 23d agoWhy 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.
- 0gs 23d agoyeah this was a misread of the surrounding context, my bad
- elAhmo 23d agoNO, this is referring to more than 750 customers with (large) $100K ARR, not Miro's ARR in total.
- deadbunny 23d agoCan they just buy Atlassian.
- throwa356262 23d agoAnd Adobe? No hold on... Adobe is probably already secretly owned by BS given their business practices.
- oathvz 23d agoFATALITY - in Mortal Kombat voice
- dserodio 23d agoI hope not. That would be a tradedy for DX, which was bought by Atlassian last year.
- pjm331 23d agomiro 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 23d agoBS 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 23d agoKomoot 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 23d agoHere I was thinking they were talking about the video player https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miro_(video_software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miro_(video_software)
- _joel 23d agoDidn't know Uri Geller was an investor now.
- fuzzfactor 23d agoIt's a mere imitation but they do deform the target using their own mentality so there is that.
- m000 23d agoDon't do it Fedon!
- _joel 23d agoI had to look that up, dear god
- nness 23d agoIsn't Bending Spoons the one who acquired Vimeo then fired all but a skeleton staff?
- KellyCriterion 23d ago....yes, and not only at Vimeo with this playbook....
- The_Blade 23d agoand 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-spoons-thrive-as-a-listed-company https://www.economist.com/business/2026/07/01/can-bending-sp...
- leugim 23d ago2xARR is extremely low, I'd like to know why they sold. After being valued at 17B selling for close to ~2B is interesting.
- bfeynman 23d agoLike 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 23d ago2x 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 23d agoI 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 23d agoShit that sucks. They'll probably all be let go if BS do their usual thing.
- katspaugh 23d agoWhat’s great about it? I shudder every time some product manager sends out a miro link. People should try Kinopio.
- jtwaleson 23d agoIt'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.
- SenHeng 23d agoWhimsical is my favourite tool for that.
- altairprime 23d agoMiro 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.
- nunez 23d agoit was excellent at whiteboarding remotely.
- pavlov 23d agoThey 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 23d agoIf 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%.
- Smeevy 23d agoMy 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.
- abdulhafeth 21d ago[flagged]
- altairprime 23d ago[flagged]
- 0xbadcafebee 23d agoYou can't really migrate off it, it has strong vendor lock-in
- arnvald 23d agoWow, 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 23d agoNotion is next
- danielrmay 23d agoWow, 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.
- b3ing 23d agoWell 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
- 627467 23d agoI'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.
- nunez 23d agoOh man; this is a horrible outcome (except for the founders; congrats to them)