Bending Spoons buying Miro for $1.355B | Hacker News Reader

Bending Spoons buying Miro for $1.355B

investors.bendingspoons.com

104 pointsandygcook76 comments

I have some friends there. Morale in the company was very very low. There were multiple rounds of lay-offs and management went AI crazy. They were desperate to live up to their extreme valuation from 2022. "We have to be the future of work" etc. Now the exit was 10x lower than their max valuation.

Great whiteboarding tool though.

Shit that sucks. They'll probably all be let go if BS do their usual thing.

What’s great about it? I shudder every time some product manager sends out a miro link.

People should try Kinopio.

It's a best-in-class real time collaboration board. It's also a decent general purpose diagramming tool, but if you're using it for creating software architecture diagrams or product flows, there are better tools for that.

Whimsical is my favourite tool for that.

Miro was always fine to use at work. It’s no Visio desktop or OmniGraffle but it wasn’t offensive and I only somewhat preferred LucidChart over it.

it was excellent at whiteboarding remotely.

They bought Airtable last month for a similarly distressed valuation.

The SaaSpocalypse has hit the post-Covid highfliers, and Bending Spoons is the grim reaper.

I don't suppose there is any big synergy hopes here. They're just identifying companies with relatively sticky enterprise accounts and will milk those.

If you’re using it, you should plan to migrate off ASAP. I’ve been a long time user of Harvest, and after Bending Spoons acquired it, they increased our pricing by 800%.

My Harvest renewal was going to be a 1,400% increase. I just cancelled the service yesterday after 20 years. While I was clicking through the "Yes, I am sure" buttons, it got down to a mere 300% increase. I wouldn't pay that purely on principle.

I'll sort of miss Harvest, but I'm acclimating myself to the idea of just writing my own timesheet software.

You can't really migrate off it, it has strong vendor lock-in

Can they just buy Atlassian.

And Adobe?

No hold on... Adobe is probably already secretly owned by BS given their business practices.

FATALITY - in Mortal Kombat voice

I hope not. That would be a tradedy for DX, which was bought by Atlassian last year.

Overheard: "The Italian exit"

2xARR is extremely low, I'd like to know why they sold. After being valued at 17B selling for close to ~2B is interesting.

Like Airtable - they probably started seeing revenue growth/acceleration plummeting due to vibecoding being able to replace the product and are pulling plug early instead of letting it grind out to 0.

2x ARR is low... But if they are making $600ARR and barely breaking even, enterprise and growth rates are slowing, or customer churn is high then it isn’t as healthy a business as it looks on paper. Especially if they don't have a new play in a highly competitive space where companies are looking to cut costs.

Didn't know Uri Geller was an investor now.

It's a mere imitation but they do deform the target using their own mentality so there is that.

Don't do it Fedon!

I had to look that up, dear god

Bending Spoons is on a buying spree!

Miro acquired my startup back in '21[0], so this is bittersweet as our users will be (eventually) affected by this. Founders and employees at Miro definitely deserve to cash out for their hard work and it's unclear (ie. not publicly known) if they will since this is a 10x down round.

Also weird that they had to sell - they were one of the most established (visual) collaboration platforms out there. I'd be keen on learning about the inside story if it ever gets public.

BS is known for aggressive management of companies they acquire, optimizing for cash flow and revenue, firing most/all of the original team, etc. Their acquisitions before Miro include Airtable, Eventbrite, AOL, Vimeo, Meetup, Evernote ... for at least a few of those, my direct experience with the product afterwards or in chats with their users, the platforms does get enshittified.

Hope that's not a deal here.

[0] https://blog.senko.net/the-story-of-a-web-whiteboard

Do they even have the moat to pull the same sort of playbook with Miro? We used to use it for remote retros and whiteboarding, we ended up not renewing because we were already paying for Lucid and there was little added value.

I'm curious to know if it was ever as embedded as, say, Jira is, in some companies.

Maybe not to the same extent. In a company I worked with recently they used it a lot but didn't store data in it, meaning there was very little lock-in: mostly inertia/convenience.

If BS slightly raise the price and ruthlessly cut costs (think - leave just a skeleton crew to keep it running), the calculation may make sense even if there's slow churn in the users and no special lock in.

(disclaimer: pure outsider speculation on my part)

bs would not have acquired them if they did

Isn't Bending Spoons the one who acquired Vimeo then fired all but a skeleton staff?

....yes, and not only at Vimeo with this playbook....

and others like Aol. and Eventbrite, but where it really hit me was Evernote. i tried to cancel and then Bending Spoons (BS for short) tried to charge me several times at a subscription 5 times the cost. i think something about pre-auth tokens across the sea on a PayPal account almost old enough to run for the House of Representatives might have had something to do with it, but IIRC BS has already had cash money rulings against it for shady-to-illegal billing practices

its reward? successful IPO. here is an Economist article from a couple months ago: https://www.economist.com/business/2026/07/01/can-bending-sp...

Wow, this is quite shocking. I used to work in Amsterdam and Miro used to be one of more well-known companies there. A few of my friends worked there at some point.

I used it quite heavily at one company. I found it a bit bloated, but it was ok, and I didn't have to jump between one tool and another, it allowed me to draw some diagrams, do retrospective, share ideas with others.

Clearly the pandemic skyrocketed their valuation to a level they couldn't maintain...

Well there goes that tool down the dumpster. Meetup has been nothing but finding ways to raise prices and revenue and not about building the site to be better, as it went downhill since like 2015/16

Is that financed by all the other companies they extract from?

Partially, but why is that a problem?

They are heavily debt financed I believe, almost $5 billion worth last I checked.

So they really are like the Private Equity of the software world.

Yes but focussing more on long-term ownership, as opposed to the usual turn-around and flip or asset stripping methodology.

More like following the Computer Associates model, a tale as old as time. Find a mature platform with a captive user population with a fat, lazy management team, buy them out, slash headcount, and open the taps. Someone in the thread mentioned Atlassian, that is a perfect target for this kind of strategy.

Atlassian is too large. Also atlassian has been doing the same growing by acquisition for a long while themselves.

ca got out-ca'ed when broadcom (avago) bought them

I'm curious that every time BS buys up some we hear about all the criticism of them and never the funding/management model thay has powered saas for the past 15-20years.

Its not like they are making high payout in the purchases. They are snatching assets off weak hands (management, investors) who has no interest or idea on how to make their operations work.

miro is my go-to for putting together diagrams for slide decks, but after having tried using it to actually work on things a few times, i've just come to the conclusion that actually virtual whiteboards are a bad UX for most things, inevitably you spend more time organizing the board than actually getting work done

As a Miro user (by force): why?

>by force

Seems like you answered your own question. Obviously there are customers and a revenue stream (I don’t even know what micro is).

Oh man; this is a horrible outcome (except for the founders; congrats to them)

Here I was thinking they were talking about the video player

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miro_(video_software)

BS is slowly but steadily growing their userbase. Knowhing how did it go for their other purchases, of which I was using many (Komoot, Eventbrite, Meetup), not a single one has avoided constant nags of prompting for upgrades and dark patterns, so this will most likely end up in a similar way.

As many share, I used Miro and found it quite nice.

Komoot is particularly bad, I paid for a lifetime license but now they are gating new features behind a subscription. I think it's time to find something else.

Wow, this might seal the deal for "SaaS-pocalypse". I imagine the upside is high for Spoons considering the wealth of data and a well-oiled product enshittification playbook.

Notion is next

Another dead tool whose users will be sucked dry. Vampire equity at is best

is the $100K ARR quote a typo?

Why would it be a typo? Miro was doing $600M ARR, some of their customers were paying them $100k+ a year. That is totally normal. It would be weird if they did not have such customers.

yeah this was a misread of the surrounding context, my bad

NO, this is referring to more than 750 customers with (large) $100K ARR, not Miro's ARR in total.

Is Bending Spoons the PE for startups?

Yes. Buying companies at their actual value and then optimising the and extracting value they can. Considering lot of these startups and how they have acted I don't even consider them anyway evil.

More like the vulture PE for startups.

It's a solid business model though - get another team to take the risk and develop the app and user base, then when times are tough, buy them out, wring them dry and suck out all the value. In the meantime, don't do any extra feature development on the apps, just run them on maintenance mode with a lean dev team and zero support.

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