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A real life 36" x 24" dry erase white board goes for as little as $30 on Amazon. An app that lets coworkers use a whiteboard in digital space is worth between $17 billion and $20 billion. Welcome to the future.
On Thursday, the Financial Times reported that Miro — a software company that lets teams and coworkers use shared, visual workspaces — is on the precipice of fetching an enormous valuation. It's a testament to the enduring appeal of work-from-home tech, and the emerging metaverse.
White Hot Deal
When Andrey Khusid founded Miro in Russia in 2011, all he wanted was a virtual whiteboard so he could talk to clients of his design agency that weren't in the room. The company, now jointly headquartered in San Francisco and Amsterdam, spent the last decade in modest growth, building out free and subscription-based software for teams to collaborate in shared, visual workspaces.
And then, of course, the pandemic happened. Working from home became an essential component of life for almost every white collar worker on the planet, and Miro had spent the last decade building software for that very purpose.
The company — which has 25 million users and 95% of Fortune 100 companies as clients — is now in talks with wealth investment firm Iconiq Capital for a $400 million round that would value Miro at $17 billion. Other investors have tabled offers that would value the company at $20 billion. It would be just the latest workplace collaboration start-up to fetch a massive valuation:
- In September, Australian design software company Canva raised $200 million that valued it at $40 billion, while competitor Figma raised $200 million at a $10 billion valuation in June.
- Researchers at Gartner estimate visual collaboration software have received a 10-fold increase in interest in just the last 18 months.
The Bottom Line: Some start-ups prioritize scale, others profitability. Miro has no problem with both: the company is on track to make more than $300 million in annual recurring revenues this year, three times what it made in 2020, and as of last year was profitable.
