Miro Went AI-First. It Still Sold for 2.3x Revenue.

TL;DR

On September 10, Bending Spoons agreed to buy Miro at an enterprise value of $1.355 billion, or about $1.79 billion once Miro's cash is counted. Miro is profitable, has around $600 million in annual recurring revenue and nearly 4 million paying users, and describes itself as "an AI-first workspace." The price works out to about 2.3 times ARR, roughly 90 percent below the $17.5 billion Miro was valued at in 2022. Five weeks earlier the same buyer agreed to take Airtable, which had launched its own multi-agent product, for about 2.7 times ARR. In the same week, Cognition raised at roughly 53 times run-rate revenue. Adding AI features did not reprice either seller. Using AI to run software with fewer people is the thesis that let a buyer write both checks.

The deal

The announcement is short. Bending Spoons, which listed on Nasdaq in July under the ticker BSP, will buy 100 percent of Miro in an all-cash transaction at a $1.355 billion enterprise value. Miro's net cash, about $435 million per TechCrunch, lifts the implied equity value to roughly $1.79 billion. Certain Miro shareholders will put $295 million of their proceeds back into newly issued Bending Spoons stock. Closing is expected in the fourth quarter, subject to regulatory approvals.

What Bending Spoons gets, per the release and The Next Web:

• About $600 million in ARR, nearly 90 percent of it from business and enterprise customers.
• More than 100 million users across 250,000 customer organizations, nearly 4 million of them paying.
• More than 750 customers paying over $100,000 a year each.
• A profitable company that, according to Reworked, never raised outside money again after its 2022 round.

Miro CEO and co-founder Andrey Khusid framed the product this way: "It has become something more: an AI-first workspace that teams run their most important work through." Bending Spoons CEO Luca Ferrari said the company plans to "invest substantially in the fundamentals that its customers value: performance, reliability, and functionality."

From $17.5 billion to 2.3x

In January 2022, Miro raised $400 million at a $17.5 billion valuation. The equity value in this deal is about a tenth of that. On an enterprise value basis, TechCrunch puts the drop at 92 percent.

Airtable took the same road in August. Bending Spoons agreed on August 4 to buy it at a $1.285 billion enterprise value, or about $2.25 billion including net cash. Airtable reported about $480 million in ARR as of June, growing more than 20 percent a year, and serves more than 500,000 organizations. It was valued at over $11 billion at its 2021 peak and, per TechCrunch, around $4 billion on secondary markets earlier this year. That deal closed in the first week of September.

Look at what the cash does to those headline numbers. At Miro, net cash is about a quarter of the equity value. At Airtable, the gap between enterprise value and equity value implies roughly $965 million, well over 40 percent of the check. A buyer that pays $2.25 billion and gets close to a billion of it straight back from the target's bank account is paying far less for the software than the headline suggests.

Both sellers had already gone AI-first

Neither company was sitting still on AI. Miro unveiled what it billed as an AI "innovation workspace" in fall 2024 and today sells AI assistants, workflows, and prototyping tools on its canvas, with connectors into GitHub, Jira, and Slack. Reworked notes that Miro cut about 18 percent of staff, some 275 people, in October 2024, weeks after that launch. Airtable launched Superagent, a standalone multi-agent research product, in January 2026.

Miro called itself "AI-first" in the same press release that announced its sale at about a tenth of its peak valuation. Marketing copy has had rougher days, but not many. The explanations for the markdown vary by outlet. Silicon Republic calls it "part of a downward trend attributed to the major AI-led disruption in the SaaS sector." TechCrunch points to unwound 2021 multiples, enterprise spending cuts, and better-funded rivals such as Figma, Canva, and Microsoft. Both are probably true, and neither is fixed by a new AI tab in the toolbar.

Meanwhile, at 53x

On September 8, two days before the Miro deal, Cognition raised $2 billion at a $48 billion valuation. Its run-rate revenue has grown to nearly $900 million from $492 million in May, when it raised at $26 billion. Both rounds price the company at about 53 times run-rate revenue. Cognition's multiple did not budge between rounds. Its revenue just nearly doubled in four months, which is the kind of problem Miro's 2022 board would have loved to have.

The comparison is not apples to apples. A minority venture round and a control acquisition are different instruments, and Cognition is priced on growth that neither Miro nor Airtable can show. That is exactly the point. The market is not paying for the word "AI." It is paying for growth, and when growth is gone it pays for cash flow, at a price set by whoever can run the business most cheaply.

The buyer's AI is the actual thesis

Bending Spoons puts its model in the boilerplate of every release. It buys digital businesses and runs a "deep" transformation: "reorganizing teams, overhauling technology, redesigning user interfaces, accelerating product development, and enhancing marketing and monetization." Then comes the line that matters here: "AI is often both a central component of the vision and a key tool in implementing the transformation."

The IPO filing put numbers on that. According to Fortune, the share of Bending Spoons pull requests authored or co-authored by AI rose from under 10 percent in the first quarter of 2025 to more than 90 percent a year later. Revenue per employee in its core workforce climbed from $1.12 million in 2023 to $2.57 million in 2025, a gain the company partly credits to AI, per The AI and Software Report. Revenue grew 95 percent in 2025 to $1.31 billion. Ferrari's own summary, as quoted by TechCrunch: "As AI enables us to accomplish more with fewer people, the scalability of our acquisition and transformation model should improve as well."

Think of it as house flipping. The flipper does not pay extra for the smart thermostat the last owner installed, because the thermostat is not why the house is worth buying. The flipper pays for the frame and the address, and makes money because their crew costs less than everyone else's. Miro's AI features are the thermostat. Its $600 million of mostly enterprise ARR is the address. Bending Spoons' AI-assisted engineering is the cheap crew.

The company says it has identified more than 1,000 potential acquisition targets with roughly $400 billion in combined annual revenue, according to Tech Times. It raised $1.68 billion in its July IPO, priced at $29 a share. TechSpot notes the pipeline has grown "as capital shifts toward AI, leaving older software companies with fewer funding options." Venture money chasing AI-native companies is part of what makes the older ones cheap.

What usually happens next

Neither company has announced cuts at Miro. The track record is public, though. At WeTransfer, roughly three-quarters of staff were let go after the 2024 acquisition and the free plan was later capped at 10 transfers a month. At Vimeo, most of the workforce was laid off. At Evernote, the existing staff was largely cut in 2023. By the company's own account to TechCrunch, the AOL, Eventbrite, and Vimeo deals added 1,830 full-time-equivalent staff, and "once the transformations of the three businesses are substantially complete later in 2026, we expect only a few hundred to remain." Co-founder Matteo Danieli told the same outlet that customer retention through those changes has been "remarkably stable."

Pricing tends to move too. Ferrari told Follow the Money last year: "I agree that we often increase prices for users who use an application most frequently." Miro has more than 750 customers each paying over $100,000 a year. Those are, almost by definition, the heaviest users in the building.

What a builder should take from this

• AI features are table stakes, not a multiple. Two companies that rebuilt their pitch around AI still sold for 2.3x and 2.7x ARR. If your valuation story depends on adding an agent to a seat-based product, test that story against these two prints.
• Growth is the only thing priced like AI. Cognition's multiple held at about 53x across two rounds because revenue nearly doubled. Airtable was growing more than 20 percent a year and still got 2.7x. The gap between those two numbers is the price of slowing down.
• Cash on the balance sheet counts dollar for dollar. Miro and Airtable both stayed disciplined enough to carry large cash balances, and those balances made up a big slice of what shareholders received.
• Your acquirer's cost structure sets your price. A buyer that ships most code changes with AI assistance and runs far more revenue per head can pay for flat ARR and still make money. If you run a small SaaS, that same operating model is available to you before a buyer arrives.
• Heavy users are the monetization plan. If you sell to a roll-up, expect your biggest customers to see the biggest price changes.

Caveats

The Miro deal has not closed and needs regulatory approval. Miro did not disclose its growth rate, so the 2.3x multiple cannot be adjusted for growth the way Airtable's can. Some of the 90 percent markdown is simply 2021 and 2022 valuations returning to earth, which would have happened with or without AI. The multiples compare enterprise value to ARR for the acquisitions and post-money valuation to run-rate revenue for Cognition, which are related but not identical measures.

Key Takeaways

• Bending Spoons agreed on September 10 to buy Miro at a $1.355 billion enterprise value, about $1.79 billion in equity, for a profitable business with about $600 million in ARR.
• That is roughly 2.3x ARR and about 90 percent below Miro's $17.5 billion valuation from January 2022.
• Airtable, bought by the same company five weeks earlier, went for about 2.7x ARR despite growing more than 20 percent and launching a multi-agent product.
• Cognition raised at about 53x run-rate revenue the same week: the market pays for AI-driven growth, not AI-branded features.
• Bending Spoons' IPO filing says AI-authored or co-authored pull requests rose from under 10 percent to more than 90 percent, and revenue per employee more than doubled from 2023 to 2025.
• Its track record after deals includes deep layoffs and higher prices for the most active users, and Miro's biggest customers fit that profile.

Sources: Bending Spoons: agreement to acquire Miro (September 10, 2026), Bending Spoons: agreement to acquire Airtable (August 4, 2026), TechCrunch: Bending Spoons to buy Miro, The Next Web, Reworked, Silicon Republic, TechCrunch: Bending Spoons to buy Airtable, Built In: Airtable launches Superagent, SiliconANGLE: Cognition raises $2B at $48B, Fortune: Bending Spoons files for IPO, TechCrunch: What is Bending Spoons?, The AI and Software Report, Tech Times, TechSpot, Follow the Money