16 SEP 2026 — Bending Spoons has agreed to buy Miro, the digital whiteboard company, for an enterprise value of $1.355 billion. The price is not the interesting part. The Milan company has a recent record of cutting staff sharply after it buys software.
The all-cash deal, announced on 10 September, implies an equity value of about $1.79 billion once Miro's net cash is counted. Some Miro shareholders have agreed to put $295 million of their proceeds back into newly issued Bending Spoons equity. Both boards approved it unanimously. It is expected to close in the fourth quarter of 2026, subject to regulatory approvals.
What Bending Spoons is buying
Miro is not a distressed asset. It runs at around $600 million in annual recurring revenue, nearly 90 per cent of it from business and enterprise customers. Roughly 4 million people pay for it, across more than 250,000 organisations, and over 750 of those customers pay more than $100,000 a year. Accenture, Cisco, Deloitte and HP are named among them.
Andrey Khusid, who co-founded Miro fifteen years ago and runs it, said "The best version of Miro is still ahead of us." Luca Ferrari, the Bending Spoons chief executive, said the company would invest substantially in Miro's performance, reliability and functionality.
The record that the announcement does not mention
Bending Spoons listed on Nasdaq on 1 July 2026, and the offering is part of why this deal is worth watching: the company now buys in public, with a share price and quarterly disclosure attached to how well the model works. By March 2026 it reported more than 500 million monthly active users and more than 9 million paying customers across its portfolio. Its four cofounders kept more than 80 per cent of the voting power through the listing.
The company was founded in Milan in 2013 and has spent the past three years buying well-known software companies: Evernote, Meetup, StreamYard, Issuu, WeTransfer, Brightcove for $233 million, Komoot, Harvest, Vimeo for $1.38 billion, Eventbrite for $500 million, and AOL.
After an acquisition, the pattern is consistent enough to be called a method. TechCrunch's account records 129 staff laid off after Evernote, about 75 per cent of WeTransfer's staff cut within weeks, more than 85 per cent of Brightcove's roughly 200 employees let go, and most of Vimeo's workforce, including the entire video team, gone by January.
The company does not hide the model. Its own disclosure says that of the 1,830 full-time equivalents it absorbed with AOL, Eventbrite and Vimeo, it expects only a few hundred to remain once those transformations finish in 2026.
Why the maths works
Bending Spoons reported $1.31 billion of revenue in 2025 with a core staff of about 620 people. Revenue per full-time equivalent moved from $1.12 million in 2023 to $2.57 million in 2025, then to $0.97 million in the first quarter of 2026, the dip being what absorbing thousands of acquired employees looks like before the cuts land.
The strategy resembles private equity, with one difference: Bending Spoons keeps the brands rather than flipping them. Acquire a product with entrenched users, remove most of the staff, centralise engineering and operations, raise prices where the users will tolerate it, and run the result at a margin the original owner could not.
The company took $340 million in 2022, $155 million in 2024 and $710 million in 2025 before listing, which is the capital base that makes a $1.355 billion cash deal possible at this size.
Ferrari has been explicit about the ambition, saying the company has identified more than 1,000 digital businesses representing nearly $400 billion in aggregate estimated 2025 revenue, and that as AI lets the company do more with fewer people, the scalability of the model should improve.
What it means for the people using Miro
Miro sits in the middle of how a lot of teams work. It holds whiteboards, retrospectives, roadmaps and diagrams that nobody has exported since the day they were drawn, which is exactly the entrenchment that makes the asset attractive and makes switching painful.
Based on the company's record, users can reasonably expect the product to continue, with a considerably smaller team behind it and pricing pressure over time. Free tiers have been narrowed before, at WeTransfer in December 2024.
None of that is a prediction about Miro specifically, and Bending Spoons says retention across its acquisitions has been remarkably stable. That claim and the layoff record are both true, and they sit together uncomfortably: the products keep their customers because the customers cannot easily leave.
What to watch
The first thing is the closing condition itself. A $1.355 billion cross-border deal touching enterprise software used by large regulated customers needs regulatory approvals in several jurisdictions, and the fourth-quarter timing assumes they arrive.
Then the headcount, which will be visible within weeks of closing rather than years, and which is the clearest signal of whether Miro is being run or restructured.
And prices, particularly on the business tiers where 90 per cent of the revenue sits. A team with four million paying users is a large installed base to test with, and enterprise contracts renew on a schedule that makes any change legible.
