In 2022, Miro was valued at $17.5 billion. This week it sold to Bending Spoons for $1.36 billion. The math is not a rounding error. It is a verdict. The infinite whiteboard, the endless canvas of remote-work optimism, has been marked down 92% from peak. Not because the product stopped working. Because the premise it was sold on, that distributed knowledge work would generate premium software valuations indefinitely, turned out to be a moment, not a market.
Bending Spoons and the Art of Buying Fallen Valuations
Bending Spoons is a particular kind of acquirer: Italian, disciplined, allergic to hype, and very good at running profitable software businesses at scale without the VC-funded growth theater. They bought Evernote in 2023, Meetup, Splice. The pattern is consistent. Find a product with real users and a bloated cost structure, strip it back, charge more, retain the core. Miro has 80 million users. That number did not change when the valuation did. What Bending Spoons is buying is not the whiteboard. It is the retention curve, which is a very different asset to underwrite.
The art market parallel is hard to ignore. Artnet's report on the art world's season of recalibration describes dealers cutting costs and collectors seeking bargains, a market where the speculative premium has drained out and what remains is the work itself. The Miro deal is the same story in SaaS. The 2021-2022 valuation was the speculative premium. The $1.36 billion is what the work is worth when the room cools down. Both markets are discovering that the underlying thing, the painting, the software, had real value all along. Just not $17.5 billion worth. The question now is whether the founders who raised at peak treated the valuation as a number or as a plan, and how many of them confused the two.
What the Whiteboard Was Really Selling
Miro was never just project management software. It sold a vision of how creative work would feel in a distributed world: spatial, collaborative, synchronous even across time zones. That vision tracked the cultural moment of 2020-2022 so precisely that it became inseparable from it. Kyle Chayka's work on algorithmic homogenization is useful here: when a tool becomes the default, it starts shaping the work rather than serving it. The infinite canvas became the aesthetic of remote creative work. Now that the aesthetic has dated, so has the premium. Bending Spoons did not kill the whiteboard. The whiteboard killed the whiteboard by becoming wallpaper.