Bending Spoons agrees to buy Amsterdam's Miro for $1.355bn

Bending Spoons has agreed to acquire Miro in an all-cash deal that values the Amsterdam-founded collaboration platform at an enterprise value of $1.355bn. Including Miro's net cash, the Milan-based group said the transaction implies an equity value of roughly $1.79bn, with the deal expected to close in the fourth quarter of 2026 pending regulatory approval.

The agreement marks one of the largest exits by a European software company this year, and it comes just a week after Bending Spoons closed its purchase of Airtable, a US-based rival in the same broad collaboration-software category. It is a striking run for a 14-year-old product that began life as a browser whiteboard called RealtimeBoard.

Why Bending Spoons wants Miro

Miro has grown to around $600m in annual recurring revenue, with close to 90% of that coming from business and enterprise accounts rather than individual users. The company counts more than 100 million users across some 250,000 customer organisations, of which nearly 4 million are paying users and more than 750 generate above $100,000 a year each.

Luca Ferrari, Bending Spoons' chief executive and co-founder, said the acquisition carries weight given how embedded Miro has become in customers' daily workflows. "It's a privilege, and no small responsibility, to welcome a product that over 250,000 organizations have integrated into their workflows," he said. He added that after closing, the company plans to put money into the parts of the product customers rely on most: performance, reliability and functionality for collaborative work.

That approach is consistent with how Bending Spoons has handled previous purchases such as Evernote, Vimeo, WeTransfer and AOL. The group's model is to buy established digital products, overhaul their technology and interfaces, and reinvest the resulting earnings into further acquisitions. Ferrari said the company intends to run Miro for the long term rather than flip it. "We acquire businesses with the intention of owning and operating them for the long term, and Miro will be no exception," he said.

What Miro's founder gets out of it

Andrey Khusid, Miro's chief executive and co-founder, framed the sale as the next stage of a company he started to solve a problem at his own design agency. He said Miro began fifteen years ago as a way for teams to think together and has since grown into an AI-first workspace that handles their most important work. He told stakeholders that "the best version of Miro is still ahead of us."

Under the terms of the deal, some Miro shareholders have agreed to roll $295m of their proceeds into newly issued Bending Spoons equity rather than cash out entirely, though the statement did not name them. Bending Spoons will otherwise acquire all of Miro's outstanding shares, and both boards have approved the transaction unanimously. Until the deal closes, the two companies continue to operate separately.

Bending Spoons funded this run of acquisitions partly through its own Nasdaq listing in July, which raised $1.68bn, and a subsequent €500m loan backed by Italy's export credit agency SACE earmarked for further deals. That capital base helps explain why the group could move on Airtable and Miro within the same month.

A tighter field for workplace canvases

Miro's pitch has shifted markedly since its RealtimeBoard days, when it was essentially a digital sticky-note board for remote teams. It now markets itself as an AI workspace, layering assistants, automated workflows and prototyping tools onto its canvas, and drawing in context from software like GitHub, Jira and Slack. That leaves it competing more directly with Figma, which has added its own AI assistant to its design canvas, as well as with Canva and Microsoft, both of which keep pushing further into collaborative, AI-assisted work tools.

For European founders watching the deal, it offers two data points worth noting. One is that a homegrown collaboration product, built in Amsterdam and later headquartered in San Francisco, scaled to $600m in recurring revenue and a profitable business before an acquirer came calling, rather than needing an IPO to deliver an exit. The other is how aggressively Bending Spoons is using its newly public balance sheet to consolidate software categories, having bought Airtable and Miro within weeks of each other. Whether that pace continues, and which collaboration tools it targets next, is the open question hanging over the sector now.