Miro Series C

Miro raised $400M at a $17.5B valuation in January 2022, which is like proposing marriage on the third date because you both really vibed during lockdown. I remember those early pandemic days when my entire creative class migrated online and suddenly every brainstorming session required a infinite digital whiteboard where we'd stick virtual Post-its that nobody could read. Miro became shorthand for "async collaboration," the kind of buzzword that VCs were mainlining in 2021. But here's the thing: Iconiq and Accel led this round right as the market was about to violently correct itself, pricing Miro at roughly 100x ARR when Figma—an actually essential tool—was trading at similar multiples. The valuation assumed永续 remote work supremacy and category dominance in a space that was already crowded with Figma, Mural, and even Microsoft's infinite canvas ambitions. This wasn't visionary investing; this was FOMO calculus dressed up as thesis-driven deployment.

The timing here is catastrophically bad in retrospect, but also predictable if anyone had been paying attention to anything other than their own cap table markups. January 2022 was peak "don't fight the Fed until the Fed starts fighting you" energy—the writing was already on the infinite whiteboard that inflation wasn't transitory and rate hikes were coming. Collaboration software had already begun showing signs of saturation; companies were cutting seats, not adding them. Miro's growth trajectory was impressive if you squinted and only looked at 2020-2021, but that's like being impressed by a sourdough starter's performance during lockdown. Everyone was baking bread then. Everyone was whiteboarding remotely then. The question VCs should have asked: what happens when people remember that actual whiteboards exist and most brainstorming is performative bullshit anyway?

Let's talk about what Miro actually does that justifies this valuation: not enough. The product is fine—genuinely useful for certain use cases, particularly distributed teams doing design sprints or workshop facilitation. But "fine" and "useful for certain use cases" doesn't justify a $17.5B valuation unless you're hallucinating TAM expansion that requires every knowledge worker to become a chronic whiteboard user. The competitive dynamics are brutal: Figma has FigJam (and got acquired by Adobe for $20B, which makes this valuation look even more delusional), Mural is basically the same product, and Microsoft can bundle similar functionality for free and destroy your margins. Notion added canvases. Everyone added canvases. Miro's defensibility relies on network effects that mostly matter for large enterprise deployments, but those same enterprises are currently conducting SaaS audits and cutting tools that had 30% utilization rates during the pandemic froth.

The exit potential here is grim, and I mean that with the kind of certainty I usually reserve for predicting that a tech bro's "European summer" Instagram will include at least three Aperol spritzes. At $17.5B, you need either a strategic acquisition by someone with infinite money and questionable judgment (hi, Microsoft, but probably not) or a public market debut that requires sustained growth and profitability that Miro probably can't demonstrate in this macro environment. The IPO window stayed shut through 2022-2024, and even if it opens, who's buying? Iconiq and Accel are sophisticated investors, which makes this deal even more puzzling—they should have known better, should have modeled the reversion to mean, should have pumped the brakes. Instead they underwrote pandemic-era assumptions into permanent reality and now everyone's holding a bag that gets heavier every quarter when the down-round discussions start.