[DigitalToday reporter Chi-gyu Hwang (황치규)] Italian software company Bending Spoons will acquire collaboration tool Miro in an all-cash deal worth $1.36 billion, TechCrunch reported on Thursday.

The deal is at a steep discount given that Miro was valued at more than $17.5 billion at the end of 2021.

Miro began in 2011 as a whiteboard tool called RealtimeBoard. It started to gain momentum as remote work spread during the COVID-19 pandemic. It later integrated with more than 250 apps and partnered with Atlassian, Cisco, Microsoft and Zoom. It currently offers an AI assistant for whiteboards, AI workflows, prototyping tools, and AI connectors linked to GitHub, Jira and Slack.

By 2022, Miro increased users from 5 million to about 30 million in two years and expanded its base of paying customers by 550 percent. It now has more than 4 million paying users and more than 100 million total users. Annual recurring revenue is about $600 million. Of that, 90 percent comes from corporate customers. It has about $435 million in net cash and is profitable.

But its growth is viewed as less steep than during the pandemic. In 2022, company valuations for SaaS firms were sharply adjusted as companies cut spending on overlapping apps and licence costs. Miro has competed in the collaboration market with Canva, Figma and Microsoft. TechCrunch reported that companies’ preference for product suites bundling multiple products, rather than individual collaboration tools, also became a burden.

Against that backdrop, Miro also carried out restructuring. It had about 1,200 employees in 2022, but it was reported to have cut 119 staff in February 2023 and a further 275 in October 2024.

Bending Spoons also acquired Airtable, which was valued at more than $11 billion in 2021, for $1.28 billion.