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- Hacker News
- I'm curious that every time BS buys up some we hear about all the criticism of them and never the funding/management model thay has powered saas for the past 15-20years.
Its not like they are making high payout in the purchases. They are snatching assets off weak hands (management, investors) who has no interest or idea on how to make their operations work.
by 627467 - Well there goes that tool down the dumpster. Meetup has been nothing but finding ways to raise prices and revenue and not about building the site to be better, as it went downhill since like 2015/16by b3ing
- Wow, this is quite shocking. I used to work in Amsterdam and Miro used to be one of more well-known companies there. A few of my friends worked there at some point.
I used it quite heavily at one company. I found it a bit bloated, but it was ok, and I didn't have to jump between one tool and another, it allowed me to draw some diagrams, do retrospective, share ideas with others.
Clearly the pandemic skyrocketed their valuation to a level they couldn't maintain...
by arnvald - Isn't Bending Spoons the one who acquired Vimeo then fired all but a skeleton staff?by nness
- ....yes, and not only at Vimeo with this playbook....
- and others like Aol. and Eventbrite, but where it really hit me was Evernote. i tried to cancel and then Bending Spoons (BS for short) tried to charge me several times at a subscription 5 times the cost. i think something about pre-auth tokens across the sea on a PayPal account almost old enough to run for the House of Representatives might have had something to do with it, but IIRC BS has already had cash money rulings against it for shady-to-illegal billing practices
its reward? successful IPO. here is an Economist article from a couple months ago: https://www.economist.com/business/2026/07/01/can-bending-sp...
by The_Blade - Bending Spoons is on a buying spree!
Miro acquired my startup back in '21[0], so this is bittersweet as our users will be (eventually) affected by this. Founders and employees at Miro definitely deserve to cash out for their hard work and it's unclear (ie. not publicly known) if they will since this is a 10x down round.
Also weird that they had to sell - they were one of the most established (visual) collaboration platforms out there. I'd be keen on learning about the inside story if it ever gets public.
BS is known for aggressive management of companies they acquire, optimizing for cash flow and revenue, firing most/all of the original team, etc. Their acquisitions before Miro include Airtable, Eventbrite, AOL, Vimeo, Meetup, Evernote ... for at least a few of those, my direct experience with the product afterwards or in chats with their users, the platforms does get enshittified.
Hope that's not a deal here.
by senko - Do they even have the moat to pull the same sort of playbook with Miro? We used to use it for remote retros and whiteboarding, we ended up not renewing because we were already paying for Lucid and there was little added value.
I'm curious to know if it was ever as embedded as, say, Jira is, in some companies.
by lbreakjai - Didn't know Uri Geller was an investor now.by _joel
- Don't do it Fedon!by m000
- It's a mere imitation but they do deform the target using their own mentality so there is that.by fuzzfactor
- 2xARR is extremely low, I'd like to know why they sold. After being valued at 17B selling for close to ~2B is interesting.by leugim
- Like Airtable - they probably started seeing revenue growth/acceleration plummeting due to vibecoding being able to replace the product and are pulling plug early instead of letting it grind out to 0.by bfeynman
- 2x ARR is low... But if they are making $600ARR and barely breaking even, enterprise and growth rates are slowing, or customer churn is high then it isn’t as healthy a business as it looks on paper. Especially if they don't have a new play in a highly competitive space where companies are looking to cut costs.by kslambert
- Overheard: "The Italian exit"by tnolet
- Can they just buy Atlassian.by deadbunny
- I hope not. That would be a tradedy for DX, which was bought by Atlassian last year.by dserodio
- And Adobe?
No hold on... Adobe is probably already secretly owned by BS given their business practices.
by throwa356262 - If you’re using it, you should plan to migrate off ASAP. I’ve been a long time user of Harvest, and after Bending Spoons acquired it, they increased our pricing by 800%.by cameldrv
- My Harvest renewal was going to be a 1,400% increase. I just cancelled the service yesterday after 20 years. While I was clicking through the "Yes, I am sure" buttons, it got down to a mere 300% increase. I wouldn't pay that purely on principle.
I'll sort of miss Harvest, but I'm acclimating myself to the idea of just writing my own timesheet software.
by Smeevy - You can't really migrate off it, it has strong vendor lock-inby 0xbadcafebee
- They bought Airtable last month for a similarly distressed valuation.
The SaaSpocalypse has hit the post-Covid highfliers, and Bending Spoons is the grim reaper.
I don't suppose there is any big synergy hopes here. They're just identifying companies with relatively sticky enterprise accounts and will milk those.
by pavlov - I have some friends there. Morale in the company was very very low. There were multiple rounds of lay-offs and management went AI crazy. They were desperate to live up to their extreme valuation from 2022. "We have to be the future of work" etc. Now the exit was 10x lower than their max valuation.
Great whiteboarding tool though.
by jtwaleson - Shit that sucks. They'll probably all be let go if BS do their usual thing.by senko
- What’s great about it? I shudder every time some product manager sends out a miro link.
People should try Kinopio.
by katspaugh