Italian software company Bending Spoons is buying Miro, the workplace whiteboarding and collaboration platform, for $1.36-billion in cash, about R23-billion, with an equity value of $1.79-billion. Miro was valued at $17.5-billion in late 2021, so the price is roughly 92% below its peak.

This is Bending Spoons' second such deal in as many months, after it bought Airtable for $1.28-billion in August.

Miro is not a failing business, which is what makes the price notable. It has more than 4 million paying users and 100 million total, about $600-million in annual recurring revenue with 90% from businesses and enterprises, roughly $435-million in net cash, and it is profitable. The drop is almost entirely a repricing of the category rather than the company.

Miro rode the pandemic remote-work wave from 5 million to 30 million users in two years, then SaaS multiples unwound as firms cut duplicate app licences and moved toward bundled suites from bigger players like Microsoft, Canva and Figma. Miro cut staff twice, in 2023 and 2024. Bending Spoons has built a model out of exactly this gap: large, recognisable software companies priced in 2021 as future giants that instead became solid, slower-growing businesses with real recurring revenue.

It buys them cheaply, runs them for cash, and has done the same with Evernote, Meetup, WeTransfer, Brightcove and now Airtable.

TechCrunch reported the deal and raised the question that hangs over it: why Miro's board and investors agreed to sell now, at that price, when the company did not need the cash, and whether that signals how far confidence in a SaaS IPO or comparable exit has fallen. TechCrunch's Airtable coverage documented the near-identical structure a month earlier, another 2021 darling sold for a fraction of its $11-billion boom valuation. Bending Spoons has said little publicly beyond confirming Miro's financials.

The number that matters to a founder here is not $1.36 billion; it is 92%. A profitable company with $600 million in recurring revenue sold for a twelfth of its paper value four years ago, because the market that set that value has changed its mind about what this kind of software is worth.

That is the risk in raising at a peak multiple: the valuation is a snapshot of sentiment, not a floor, and the gap between a 2021 round and a 2026 exit is where a lot of founder and staff equity quietly disappeared. It is the same lesson we drew from Shein's collapsed valuation, from the other direction.

For any local founder benchmarking a raise against Silicon Valley comparables, Miro is the reminder that the comparable can fall 92% and still be a healthy business. Raise against revenue you can defend, not a multiple you cannot control.

You might also like our piece on the Cognition valuation at the opposite end of the cycle, what the surge in South African M&A says about who is buying, and Verascient's seed round and where SA founders are raising.

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