The Idea
In 2011, Andrey Khusid was running a design agency called Vitamin Group out of Perm, a Russian city about 1,150km east of Moscow. The work was fine. The client meetings were the problem. In a room, you could stand at a whiteboard and land an idea in thirty seconds. On a call, you emailed static JPEGs back and forth and hoped. Khusid and his co-founder Oleg Shardin had built an entire business on visual thinking and no way to do it with anyone who wasn't sitting next to them.
So they built the thing they needed. A whiteboard that lived in a browser, with an infinite canvas, real-time editing and nothing to install. It was for their own agency first. Then their clients wanted boards of their own. Then strangers did. In 2012 the pair left Vitamin Group to work on it full time.
This was the beginning of Miro.
The Execution
- 2011 to 2013: Launched as RealtimeBoard out of Perm, free version first, growth almost entirely word of mouth. A leaked 2013 pitch deck shows the company turning over $2,170 a month and forecasting $7.3m by 2018, which is the slide every founder panicking about month four should look at.
- 2018: After seven years with no institutional money, Accel led a $25m Series A alongside Altair Capital and Scale Venture Partners, by which point the product had passed 2 million users.
- 2019: RealtimeBoard became Miro, named after the painter Joan Miró. Khusid wanted a brand people felt something about rather than a description of a feature, and thought users' boards already looked like the artist's work.
- April 2020: Lockdown turned the whiteboard into infrastructure. ICONIQ led a $50m Series B with Accel, valuing Miro at $725m on 5 million users and 20,000 paying customers.
- January 2022: The peak. A $400m Series C from ICONIQ Growth, Accel, Atlassian, Dragoneer, GIC, Salesforce Ventures and TCV took the valuation to $17.5bn post-money on $476m raised in total, with 30 million users, 99% of the Fortune 100 as customers and a profitable P&L.
- June 2022: Russia invaded Ukraine and Miro walked away from its own birthplace, shutting the Perm office and moving most of the team to Yerevan. By September 2024 it had cut off Russian and Belarusian accounts entirely under sanctions.
- February 2023: The hangover started. Khusid announced a cut of 119 roles, roughly 7% of staff, blaming macro conditions and a business model that had outgrown its shape.
- May 2024: Bought Copenhagen's Uizard, an AI prototyping tool, for an undisclosed sum. Six months later came the harder number: 275 jobs gone, 18% of the company, with Khusid citing duplicated roles and too many layers.
- 10 September 2026: Bending Spoons agreed to buy Miro for $1.355bn enterprise value, about $1.79bn in equity value including net cash, with certain shareholders rolling $295m of proceeds back into new Bending Spoons stock. The business behind it: around $600m in ARR, nearly 90% from business and enterprise customers, 4 million paying users, 250,000 organisations and more than 750 customers spending over $100,000 a year.
- Today: At roughly 2.3x ARR, the price is a 92% discount to the January 2022 mark, and the deal should close in Q4 2026, a week after Bending Spoons closed its Airtable purchase.
The lesson?
The $17.5bn was a price, not a business. The business was $600m of recurring revenue with 90% of it from enterprises, built by two agency owners in Perm who bootstrapped for seven years before taking a cent. Almost everything that made Miro worth buying in 2026 was already there in 2020. Everything that made it look like a decacorn was borrowed from a zero-rate market, and it had to be handed back. Build the revenue. The valuation is just weather.