Bending Sponges acquires Miro for $1.36 billion as a correction of collaborative work software valuations drops the platform’s value by 90 percent

The Italian company 'Bending Sponges' announced that it had reached an agreement to acquire the collaborative work tools platform 'Miro' in a cash deal worth $1.36 billion, with total equity value up to $1.79 billion. This price represents a sharp decline of about 92 percent in the platform’s valuation compared with its peak in late 2021, when its market value was estimated at roughly $17.5 billion, reflecting an accelerated unwinding of the price multiples that software-as-a-service companies enjoyed during the remote-work boom.

The platform was founded in 2011 under the name 'Realtime Board' and focused on providing a digital whiteboard that enables teams to collaborate visually in real time. It achieved a record surge when the COVID-19 pandemic spread and companies worldwide shifted to remote work, as employees sought tools that mimicked the experience of interacting with physical boards in offices. The platform leveraged that momentum quickly by building a solution that integrates with more than 250 applications and forging strategic partnerships with tech giants such as Office, Microsoft, Cisco, Zoom and Atlassian, allowing organisations to create integrations and customise the core product to suit their needs.

Those partnerships drove the user base to grow from 5 million in 2020 to roughly 30 million by 2022, and the paid-service subscriber base expanded by 550 percent, which contributed to an exceptional valuation at the time. The platform continued to scale and now reaches more than 100 million total users, including over 4 million who pay regular subscriptions. According to Bending Sponges data, Miro currently generates recurring annual revenue of about $600 million, with ninety percent of that coming from large companies and organisations, and it holds net cash of roughly $435 million while operating with ongoing operating profitability.

The shift to AI-powered innovation spaces did not prevent the platform’s market value from eroding as standalone products were repriced against major enterprise software suites.The platform repositioned its offerings as a smart innovation space, introducing AI assistants for its whiteboard, automated workflows, prototyping tools, and smart links that pull context from development and collaboration platforms such as GitHub, Jira and Slack. Nevertheless, the platform faced intense pressure from better-funded competitors such as Microsoft, Figma and Canva, especially as post-pandemic companies favoured cost-efficiency and shedding duplicate applications in favour of comprehensive software suites.

The institutional pressure translated into workforce reductions, as Miro, which employed roughly 1,200 staff in 2022, cut its headcount twice, laying off 119 employees in February 2023 and another 275 in October 2024. The deal follows Bending Sponges’ strategy of snapping up mature software companies at low prices, after it acquired the Airtable platform last month for $1.28 billion, after its valuation had previously reached $11 billion. The Italian firm applies a model that exploits the reality of software firms that were priced in 2021 as future giants but have settled into slower growth rates while retaining recurring revenue and entrenched customer bases, whereas investors and the board’s willingness to sell despite ample cash liquidity reveals a shrinking of exit opportunities through IPOs at those older valuations.

This price correction forces IT departments in the Gulf and Egypt to reassess the cost of stand-alone licenses and pushes technology teams to scrutinise the business case for independent tools.The prevailing corporate approach among large firms and regional banks focuses on consolidating software subscriptions and reducing waste from the proliferation of overlapping tools, favouring integrated features within unified systems such as cloud computing environments and central productivity suites. At the institutional level of regional startups, the deal confirms the end of the inflationary-valuation era and shows that layering AI capabilities onto traditional office tools is no longer sufficient to protect pricing margins unless those tools are tied to extensive distribution mechanisms and integrated work networks that resist institutional cost-cutting pressures.