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Bending Spoons just announced a definitive agreement to acquire Miro at a $1.355 billion enterprise value. Five weeks ago it announced Airtable at $1.285 billion, and that one just closed. Two of the better-known B2B brands of the last decade, sold to the same Milan-based rollup, inside of about a month. The Miro deal is expected to close in Q4. Both were flush. Both had years of runway, both had already been through the hard part, and both priced under 3x ARR. The two balance sheets held about $1.4 billion between them, against roughly $4 billion of combined equity value. A third of what changed hands in these two deals was money the companies already had. Getting cash flow positive is a real achievement and most B2B companies will need to do it. It buys very little at the finish line. #1. $965 million of Airtable’s price, and $435 million of Miro’s, was the company’s own bank account Airtable’s equity value was roughly $2.25 billion and its enterprise value was $1.285 billion. Miro’s equity value is roughly $1.79 billion and its enterprise value is $1.355 billion. In both cases the difference is cash: 43% of Airtable’s price, 24% of Miro’s. Buyers pay enterprise value and hand back your cash at face value. Cash is worth 1.0x. Airtable’s ARR was worth 2.7x. Miro’s is worth about 2.3x. In a company growing 60%, ARR might be worth 8x or 10x. Every dollar in the account earns the worst multiple on the cap table. It doesn’t compound and it doesn’t get repriced. Airtable had close to a billion dollars of it and Miro had close to half a billion, and none of it produced a return in either transaction. It just came back. #2. Airtable disclosed 20%+ growth. Miro’s release didn’t include a growth rate Bending Spoons’ Airtable release said ARR was growing over 20% year over year to approximately $480 million as of June 2026. The Miro release this morning gave the ARR figure (around $600 million, nearly 90% from business and enterprise customers), the paying user count (nearly 4 million), and the number of customers over $100K in ARR (more than 750). It gave no growth rate. Sacra pegged Miro at roughly $420 million in 2022 revenue, which would put the last four years in the high single digits annually. That’s a third-party estimate, and Miro has never published a figure of its own. The user numbers fill in some of the shape. Miro has about 100 million total users and 4 million paying, roughly 4% conversion. Six hundred million dollars across 4 million paying users works out to about $150 per paying user per year, on a base described as 90% business and enterprise. The 750 customers over $100K sit on top of a very long tail of small seats. The two deals still cleared within 40 basis points of each other on the multiple. Airtable at 2.7x with 20% growth and $965M of cash. Miro at 2.3x with $600M of ARR and $435M of cash. Public comps in that growth band trade around 2x. The balance sheet moved the price by roughly nothing, and the growth rate set it. #3. Airtable ran the full AI rebuild … and still cleared at 2.7x Airtable didn’t coast. Howie Liu declared a refounding in June 2025 and shipped against it: Omni as a conversational front door, Field Agents as the execution layer, the DeepSky acquisition in October 2025 that brought in David Azose, who had led engineering for ChatGPT’s business products at OpenAI, as CTO, then Superagent in January 2026, the company’s first standalone product in thirteen years. Liu went back to writing code himself and described the prior two years as wartime leadership. That is a more serious rebuild than most B2B CEOs are attempting right now. By his own January account, the company was generating cash with roughly half its raised capital still in the bank. The rebuild stabilized the business and made it defensible. It did not move the trajectory to a number that changes the multiple. Twenty percent growth on $480 million gets priced as a cash-flow asset whatever the roadmap says. The cash bought Liu the time to run that attempt. It could not make the attempt land faster. #4. Miro was already profitable in 2020, before it raised $400 million Miro told the press it was profitable when it announced the $400 million Series C at $17.5 billion in January 2022, and that it had been profitable and growing 3x before the pandemic. It raised $476 million total across fourteen years. TechCrunch reports it is still profitable today, with about $435 million in net cash. Airtable raised roughly $1.4 billion and burned through a chunk of it, including two rounds of layoffs totaling 491 people. Miro made cuts too, 119 people in February 2023 and a reported 275 in October 2024. Miro has never published a headcount, and the public estimates for it run anywhere from about 1,400 to about 1,900. Opposite capital strategies. Miro was the disciplined one and got there years earlier. The two exits landed within about $500 million of each other, with Miro’s equity value the lower of the two. Capital efficiency is a good habit and it wasn’t the variable here. Being profitable in 2020 didn’t compound into a better answer in 2026. #5. Nobody bid either deal up Two of the most recognized names in collaboration software went to a Milan-based acquirer known for buying Evernote and WeTransfer and running them for earnings. No competing bid from Salesforce or Microsoft or Atlassian has been reported for either. No growth PE process that produced a better number. For a well-capitalized B2B company growing 20% in 2026, that is the buyer set: an operator paying for the cash flows, rather than a strategic paying a control premium for the roadmap. A fortress balance sheet doesn’t summon a second bidder. It lets you decline the first one. Both companies could have declined and didn’t, which tells you what they thought another year of waiting was worth. #6. $295 million of Miro’s proceeds went straight back into Bending Spoons equity Certain Miro shareholders agreed to reinvest $295 million of what they received into newly issued Bending Spoons stock, about 16% of the equity value going right back across the table. Airtable, five weeks earlier, had no such arrangement. All cash. Bending Spoons told the SEC in its F-1 that it views its cost of equity as relatively high and has been selective about issuing equity. It issued $295 million of it here. Its net cash from operating activities was $291 million for all of 2025 and $76 million in Q1 2026. The July 1 IPO raised $1.68 billion. Airtable and Miro together run roughly $3.1 billion of equity value. The arithmetic doesn’t close on cash alone. So the most active buyer in this category has edges on its balance sheet, and a seller at 2.3x ARR still had to take a sixth of the price in the buyer’s paper. Miro is the strongest possible version of a seller here. Profitable, $435 million in the bank, no forced timeline, able to walk. The terms still bent toward the buyer. Your exit price isn’t set by a market of buyers bidding against each other. It’s set by what one buyer can fund that quarter, and by how flexible you’re willing to be on structure to get it done. #7. Five things a strong balance sheet did buy them - A process instead of a fire sale. Both deals were unanimously board-approved, all-cash, with real advisors on both sides and normal closing conditions. Compare that to what happens to PE-backed B2B companies that hit a wall with PIK debt on the cap table. - No bridge round at a 90% discount. Neither company had to go back to the market in 2023 or 2024, when the market would have set the worst possible price. - Exits above capital raised, both times. Airtable raised about $1.4 billion and cleared $2.25 billion, roughly 1.6x on capital in aggregate. Miro raised $476 million and cleared about $1.79 billion, roughly 3.8x. Aggregate multiples hide who got what: at Airtable, late-stage Series C through F investors reportedly got back roughly 1x on their preference while CRV, in early, is estimated to have returned 5-10x. Miro’s terms aren’t public, though the $400 million that came in at $17.5 billion in January 2022 is by itself 22% of the entire equity value the company just sold for. - Cash to founders and employees, rather than a rolled-over promise. See the next section for what else employees get. - Funding for the rebuild attempt. Airtable spent 2025 and early 2026 shipping instead of fundraising. All five are worth having. All five are about the downside. #8. Many employees will get a check, but then most of them will lose their job Bending Spoons booked $78.6 million in reorganization-related expenses in 2025, per its own SEC filings, after taking on 1,830 employees from the AOL, Eventbrite and Vimeo deals. It expects a few hundred of those 1,830 to still be there at the end of 2026. The individual cases run the same way: - WeTransfer: roughly 75% of staff cut within weeks of the July 2024 close, free plan later capped at 10 transfers a month. - Evernote: bought for $200 million in 2023, most US and Chile staff cut, operations moved to Europe, price raised from about $100 a year to $249, free tier restricted. - Vimeo: $1.38 billion deal closed November 2025, mass layoffs by January 2026. - AOL: more than 100 employees cut after the October 2025 acquisition. Luca Ferrari says 90% of Bending Spoons’ code is now written by AI and that the company has around 1,000 acquisition targets identified. Matteo Danieli says customer retention has been remarkably stable through the changes. The model works and none of it is illegitimate. It’s the deal. So for the well over a thousand people at Miro and whoever remains at Airtable, two things are true at once. Vested equity converts to cash at $1.79 billion and $2.25 billion, which for most rank-and-file holders with equity granted before the growth rounds is a real check of some size. And based on every prior Bending Spoons acquisition, most of those jobs go away inside a year. Cash lets you pick the buyer and the timing. It does not give you a vote on what happens to the product or the team the day after close. I watched Adobe kill EchoSign’s free edition within weeks of my leaving, and that was a strategic acquirer that wanted the business. The next owner cares less than you do, always, and a big bank account at signing changes nothing about that. #9. What I’d do with $965 million at 20% growth Cash flow positive is the state where nobody else controls your timeline. That’s the benefit, and it’s a way station rather than a destination. What matters is what you do while standing there. Airtable and Miro both had years of control and a combined $1.4 billion of dry powder, and neither converted the control into a growth rate that changed the price. The practical version: Get to default alive early, then stop treating it as a milestone. In this market you’ll likely need it. Growth-stage capital is going almost entirely to AI-native companies clearing 100%+, and a 20% grower can’t count on a next round at a price it likes. Deploy the cash into the growth rate. A dollar of cash is worth $1. A dollar of ARR at 20% growth is worth $2.30. A dollar of ARR at 60% growth is worth several times that. If the money can move you from the first band to the second, spending it is the highest-return use available. Treat a growing cash pile as a decision. Both of these companies would have been better off deploying $500 million into anything that moved the growth rate, including acquisitions, and getting it wrong. The downside of trying was capped at the 1x they were already going to get. Watch the growth rate, not the bank balance. It’s Grow or Die.
document fetched 2026-09-12 02:58 · canonical https://saastr.com/one-thing-miro-airtable-show-getting-cash-flow-positive-isnt-magical