Bending Spoons acquires Miro collaboration platform for $1.35bn

Bending Spoons, an Italian company that acquires and revamps existing businesses providing digital technologies, has recently acquired the California-based workplace collaboration platform Miro for a sum of $1.35bn. The deal values Miro at roughly $1.79bn in equity value, a significant decrease from its 2022 valuation of $17.5bn, reflecting a downward trend driven by major AI-led disruptions in the SaaS sector.

Founded in 2011 by Andrey Khusid and Oleg Shardin, Bending Spoons is co-headquartered in Amsterdam. Its platform, utilized by companies such as Ubisoft, PepsiCo, and Comcast, facilitates the integration of various tools and AI outputs into a single, governed location for collaboration. Miro's user base has surged in recent years, expanding from 30 million users in 2022 to over 100 million this year.

The company recently reported $600m in annual recurring revenue, with the bulk of it coming from its business and enterprise clients. With approximately 1,600 employees across 13 global hubs, Bending Spoons plans to invest substantially in the fundamentals that its customers value, including performance, reliability, and functionality that supports critical collaborative work.

Miro's CEO and co-founder, Luca Ferrari, expressed that the company acquires businesses with the intention of owning and operating them for the long term, and Miro will be no exception. Bending Spoons, which owns more than 50 brands, including Evernote, WeTransfer, Eventbrite, and AOL, recently acquired US automation company Airtable for an implied equity value of around $2.25bn as its second acquisition since going public in July.

Despite the acquisition, Miro's shares gained marginally at market close yesterday, although the company's shares have been down nearly 23pc in the last month.