How Bending Spoons Actually Funds Its Buyouts

Miro was valued at $17.5 billion in January 2022. On September 10, 2026, Bending Spoons announced it would buy Miro for an enterprise value of $1.355 billion — roughly $1.79 billion in equity value, including Miro's net cash. That's a 90% drop from peak. The private market repriced growth software from a category of hope to a category of cash flow, and Miro found out.

That is the headline number. The part of the deal that actually tells you how the machine works is what happens next: $295 million of Miro shareholders' proceeds are being recycled back into newly issued Bending Spoons equity. The sellers get paid out, then immediately invest about 21% of the equity value right back into the buyer's stock. They don't walk away. They buy a ticket on the ride continuing.

This is a mechanism worth understanding, because it reveals what Bending Spoons actually is. The company calls itself a "permanent capital" model — a contrast to private equity, which buys, fixes, and flips. Bending Spoons intends to hold indefinitely. It has never sold a material business. The portfolio reads like the brand names you recognize from a different era: AOL, Evernote, Vimeo, WeTransfer, Eventbrite, Meetup, Brightcove. It went public on Nasdaq in July 2026 under BSP, raised $1.1 billion in net IPO proceeds, and went shopping again within a month, buying Airtable for $1.29 billion. Now Miro.

Miro is a different asset from the older portfolio names. It has about $600 million in annual recurring revenue, nearly 4 million paying users, over 250,000 organizations, and almost 90% of revenue from business and enterprise customers. This is the kind of platform that commanded $17.5 billion when growth was the only metric. At roughly 2.25x EV/ARR, the deal sits at the top of Bending Spoons' historical acquisition range of 1.2x to 3.3x revenue, but well below the 5.6x median for tech exits. The multiple is a record of what happened: companies that looked like growth stories became cash flow stories at a discount.

The shareholder proceeds recycling mechanism is where the plumbing gets interesting. In private equity, seller rollover is a standard tool: you give founders equity in the holding company instead of all cash, which reduces your financing needs and keeps them aligned. Bending Spoons is doing the same thing, but as a publicly traded company, the equity it's issuing is liquid BSP stock — not an illiquid partnership interest. Miro's sellers are choosing between cash they could spend and shares of a company that just demonstrated it can execute at $37.75 a share with a $24 billion market cap.

The recycling reduces Bending Spoons' net cash outflow for the deal. On its face, $1.36 billion is all-cash. But $295 million of that cash comes right back in, through the equity issuance. The actual incremental burden on Bending Spoons' balance sheet — which carries $4.09 billion in net debt at a 2.4x leverage ratio, targeting 2.5x to 3.5x — is meaningfully smaller than the headline. The sellers are effectively underwriting part of the acquisition themselves.

Bending Spoons makes money by buying mature businesses at depressed multiples, reorganizing teams, overhauling technology, redesigning interfaces, and extracting margins. Q2 2026 revenue was $704 million, up 126% from the prior year — though that growth is driven by acquisitions, not organic demand. Operating margin came in at 34%. The company reported $793 million in cash with $1.28 billion in available borrowing capacity. It entered into €590 million in new term loan facilities around the time of the IPO. The acquisition engine is funded by debt, cash flow, IPO proceeds, and now — this mechanism — seller financing.

The stock has been volatile since the IPO. It priced at $29, hit $59 at its peak, and was at $37.75 as of September 10, down about 23% over the past 20 days. The market cap is around $24 billion with an enterprise value of roughly $28 billion. The trailing P/E is about 95x, which tells you the market is pricing in substantial future growth from the acquisition compounder thesis. That is a big ask of a company whose organic revenue growth slowed to 3% in Q2 and whose current ratio sits at 0.78. The market is betting on the flywheel. The financials suggest the flywheel is levered.

Miro adds both scale and risk. It's a high-quality enterprise platform with recurring revenue and large customers — exactly what Bending Spoons wants. But Miro was laying off 18% of its workforce in October 2024 amid competitive pressure and slowing growth. And Bending Spoons is acquiring at a pace that strains the integration story: Airtable in August, Tractive in May, and Miro now. That is three acquisitions in four months, each in the $750 million to $1.4 billion range, on top of integrating AOL, Eventbrite, and Vimeo from earlier rounds.

The central question for the investor is whether this is a compounding machine or an accumulating balance sheet. The deal mechanics — the low multiple, the seller proceeds recycling, the public listing as acquisition currency — all point to a company that has built a working model for acquiring depressed SaaS assets and squeezing cash flow from them. The risk is whether the model's capacity for growth keeps ahead of its capacity for leverage and integration strain.

The $295 million recycling detail is the thing to sit with. It tells you that at least some of Miro's owners believe in the Bending Spoons thesis enough to reinvest their own buyout proceeds. Or it tells you that the deal structure left them no better option. The distinction matters — and it's the kind of thing that only resolves after the integration, the next acquisition, and the next quarter's balance sheet.