Miro Owned Its Category and Still Sold for Less Than Airtable

Five weeks ago the most-forwarded story in software was a line of arithmetic: Airtable raised $1.4 billion and sold for $1.285 billion. This week the same buyer ran the same experiment on a bigger, better-known brand that owned its category far more completely, and hardly anyone bothered to do the sum. It is the worse of the two.

Bending Spoons agreed on Wednesday to buy Miro at an enterprise value of $1.355 billion, around $1.79 billion in equity once the cash is counted, all of it in cash, with a group of Miro's existing shareholders putting $295 million of their proceeds back into Bending Spoons stock. Bloomberg confirmed the terms and the company laid them out in its own announcement. The last time Miro raised, in January 2022, it took $400 million led by ICONIQ, with Accel, Atlassian and Salesforce's venture arm alongside, at a $17.5 billion valuation, as TechCrunch reported then. The sale lands at roughly a tenth of that.

The second honest valuation came in lower than the first

When Airtable sold, this publication argued that the price was never really a software valuation. It was a brand valuation, run under laboratory conditions by the one buyer who is open about not paying for technology, team or growth. Airtable's name, its distribution and the habit its customers had built cleared at 2.7 times revenue, a number the industry had spent four years declining to say aloud.

Miro is the same test with a harsher result. Set the $1.355 billion enterprise value against the roughly $600 million in recurring revenue the company puts in its own release and you get about 2.3 times revenue, under what Airtable fetched, off a peak that was far higher to start with. Miro fell ninety percent from the top where Airtable fell around eighty.

By any brand logic that is backwards. Airtable was good but hemmed in, one strong product in a crowded workflow layer. Miro had the category to itself: four million paying users, more than 250,000 organizations, over 750 customers paying six figures a year, the overwhelming majority of revenue coming from businesses and enterprises. Category leadership was supposed to be the thing that held a premium. Here it bought a smaller one.

Bending Spoons is not paying for the software

The part of a Bending Spoons deal worth reading closely is the list of things the buyer refuses to pay for, because the firm is unusually plain about it.

Not the technology. Its engineers took over a decade-old Evernote and rebuilt the backend from a monolith into microservices, which is to say they bought something they meant to tear down. The broken infrastructure is priced in on purpose.

Not the team. Follow the Money reported that at WeTransfer and Komoot about three-quarters of the original staff were gone once the deals closed. Shivaram Rajgopal, writing in Forbes, traced Evernote from 341 employees on the day it was acquired to about 60 by the end of 2024, and noted the company had disclosed material weaknesses in the internal controls it leans on to fold in what it buys. Vimeo went the same way, TechCrunch found, with most of the staff and the whole video team cut once the $1.38 billion purchase closed. Bending Spoons does not hide the mechanism, either. Its own IPO filings say AI wrote or helped write more than 90 percent of its code changes by early 2026.

Not growth. The plan, stated openly, is to buy well-known products whose growth has already flattened.

Take those three away and what is left is the name, the reflex of opening it, and the pain of leaving. That is the whole basis of an $18.4 billion company that only listed on the Nasdaq in July, and the returns say the basis holds. After Bending Spoons took Evernote, the yearly price went from about $100 to $249, the free tier was hollowed out, and revenue climbed anyway on a product people had spent two years complaining about. Miro is a harder thing to walk away from than a note app, since a team's live boards do not export anywhere usable, which is exactly what makes the habit worth buying.

Miro was renting a scarcity, the same as Airtable

Airtable's whole promise leaned on one scarce thing, engineering time. If you could not write code, it let you build the tool you needed anyway. Then a general model made that constraint go away, and the pitch stopped being wrong and started describing something you could get for nothing.

Miro leaned on a different scarcity, distance. Its brand worked because a distributed team could not gather at one physical whiteboard, and when the pandemic scattered everyone, that became a land grab Miro won, reaching 30 million users and 99 percent of the Fortune 100 by the time of the 2022 round. The infinite canvas mattered because the meeting room had gone.

Then the meeting room came back and the canvas got cheap to make. Return-to-office took some of the pressure off, and a prompt now spits out a diagram or a working board inside tools that already have the customer, Figma and Canva and Microsoft among them. Miro saw it coming and moved on it, rebranding around an AI Innovation Workspace and, as Tech Startups noted, buying Reforge about a year ago to get further into product strategy. It was a sharp response, made while the company was still healthy, and it moved the clearing price by nothing. Airtable ran into the same wall first. Leading a category is not the same as owning whatever made it scarce, and it is the second one that keeps its value once the first is commoditized.

The auction that did not happen is the brand story

What the industry keeps walking past is that Miro is exactly the sort of asset that should have set off a fight. Revenue near $600 million, almost all of it enterprise, and the cleanest ownership of a category anywhere in collaboration software. Atlassian, Salesforce, Microsoft, Figma and Canva all have reasons to want it. On the public record not one of them stepped in, and the company that more or less invented online collaboration went to a holding company with no rival bid in sight.

For a brand desk the silence is the finding. The buyers who could actually have paid a premium for the name and the installed habit, the people best equipped to price it, looked and decided they would sooner build the thing with AI than pay up for the brand that made it famous. If the incumbents will not reach for the defining name in a category, there is nothing left in the category to charge a brand premium for. The $295 million that Miro's own insiders rolled into Bending Spoons stock rather than taking as cash says the same thing from the inside. The people closest to the asset would rather bet on the operator's cash machine than on Miro on its own.

What it speaks to

For four years the cohort sat on one position it never stated. The 2021 marks were paper, everyone knew the real numbers ran lower, and nobody had to say so while no genuinely healthy company put it to the test. Airtable put it to the test and printed 2.7 times revenue. Miro, healthier on most brand measures and carrying a category of its own, printed less. Every board still holding a 2021 mark now has two comparables it cannot wave away, and the kinder of the two is the older one.

The deeper reading is a brand reading. Money has not left software; it is being raised this quarter at fifty times forward revenue by companies with a sliver of Miro's customers. What has left is the premium the story used to carry. Take the narrative out and the residue is the name on the browser tab, the habit of clicking it and the cost of quitting, and for a company that spent fifteen years making itself the default answer, that residue came to about 2.3 times revenue, with no strategic buyer willing to outbid a roll-up to hold on to it.

Two healthy companies have now cleared at the number nobody wanted to name, and most of the field will read it, agree, and go on pricing themselves off the mark that just missed twice.