This $17.5 Billion Startup Just Sold for 90% Less Than It Was Once Worth

Miro was worth $17.5 billion in 2021. This week, an Italian company most Americans have never heard of bought it for $1.36 billion — a 90% markdown. It's the second time in five weeks that same buyer has picked up a fallen software unicorn for pennies on the dollar.

Bending Spoons announced on September 10, 2026 that it had agreed to acquire Miro, the workplace whiteboarding platform, in an all-cash deal at an enterprise value of $1.355 billion. Together with Miro's net cash, that implies an equity value of about $1.79 billion — still a fraction of what investors valued the company at during the pandemic-era software boom.

Bending Spoons isn't a household name, but its buying spree is becoming one. The Milan-based firm listed on Nasdaq in July 2026, and has spent the weeks since going on what amounts to a shopping trip through the wreckage of the 2021 software boom. Just a week before the Miro deal, it closed its acquisition of Airtable — another company that had been valued above $11 billion in 2021 and sold for roughly $1.28 billion.

This isn't a company that quietly failed. Miro has grown to around $600 million in annual recurring revenue, nearly 90% of it from business and enterprise customers, and more than 250,000 organizations use it. Almost 4 million people pay for it, including over 750 customers each contributing more than $100,000 a year. The 90% valuation cut isn't a story about the product failing — it's a story about what happens when a company raised money at 2021 prices and the market never came back to meet it.

The deal was unanimously approved by both companies' boards and is expected to close in the fourth quarter of 2026, pending regulatory approval. Notably, some Miro shareholders have agreed to roll $295 million of their payout directly into newly issued Bending Spoons stock — a sign that at least some of the people cashing out at a steep loss still want exposure to whatever Bending Spoons does next.

Two acquisitions in five weeks, both of companies once valued at 8-figure-plus multiples of what they just sold for, is not a coincidence — it's a strategy. If Bending Spoons keeps finding well-run, revenue-generating SaaS companies still carrying inflated 2021 price tags in investors' heads, this almost certainly won't be the last markdown deal it announces this year.