Bending Spoons is continuing its trend of buying once-sought-after software companies for pennies on the dollar. This time, the Italian company is buying Miro for $1.36 billion in cash (equity value of $1.79 billion), a mighty dip in valuation for the once-hot workplace collaboration startup that was awarded a price tag of $17.5 billion in late 2021.

Founded in 2011 as a whiteboarding tool called RealtimeBoard, Miro found great fortune during the COVID-19 pandemic, when companies moved to remote work en masse, and found their employees wanting to replicate the experience of collaborating on a physical whiteboard.

Miro quickly capitalized on that momentum by building a platform that could integrate with more than 250 apps, and struck partnerships with Atlassian, Cisco, Microsoft, and Zoom. The company also started letting its users build integrations with common tools and customize the base product to meet their needs. Today, it calls itself an “AI innovation workspace” that offers AI assistants for its whiteboard tools, AI workflows, prototyping tools, and AI connectors that pull context from various platforms like GitHub, Jira, and Slack.

By 2022, Miro had grown from five million to about 30 million users within a scant two years, and its paying customer base had expanded by 550% — factors that likely contributed to its immense valuation at the time.

By all indications, the company has continued growing, though not at that blistering pace. Today, Miro has more than four million paying users and 100 million total users. Bending Spoons said Miro now has about $600 million in annual recurring revenue, of which 90% comes from businesses and enterprises. The company also has about $435 million in net cash, and is profitable.

Still, the 92% dip in Miro’s valuation is illustrative of just how much software-as-a-service (SaaS) multiples have unwound since its heydays of 2021. By 2022, the dying pandemic tailwinds spurred companies to tighten spending by cutting down on duplicate apps and licenses. Miro, competing with much-better funded rivals such as Canva, Figma, and Microsoft in the workplace collaboration space, likely found itself shoved aside as businesses started preferring suites of various products instead of individual collaboration tools.

Miro, which had about 1,200 employees in 2022, cut jobs twice, laying off 119 staff in February 2023 and reportedly another 275 people in October 2024.

Bending Spoons, however, is probably happy it is able to snap up a company that’s been doing quite well for a smidgen of its former, arguably inflated, value. In that way, Miro is pretty similar to Airtable, which was valued at over $11 billion in the boom days of 2021, but sold to Bending Spoons for $1.28 billion last month.

The Italian serial acquirer of software companies seems to be exploiting a specific change: Large, recognizable SaaS companies that were priced in 2021 as if they’d become software giants, but matured into slower-growing but still substantial businesses with decent recurring revenue and established user bases.

Still, it’s curious why Miro’s board and investors agreed to sell at that price now, especially seeing that the company didn’t apparently need the cash. Has confidence in SaaS companies being able to go public or find a comparable exit really plummeted that low?