MIRO

Andrey Khusid and Oleg Shardin started building a collaborative whiteboard tool in 2011 in Perm, Russia — a city of 1 million people in the Ural Mountains, about 1,400 km east of Moscow. The original name was RealtimeBoard.

They built the product for 8 years in relative obscurity, slowly gaining traction with design teams, product managers, and agile coaches who needed a digital canvas for brainstorming and planning. By 2019, they had rebranded to Miro and moved the headquarters to San Francisco while keeping the engineering team in Russia and Europe.

Then COVID hit. Overnight, every company in the world needed a way to replicate the experience of standing around a whiteboard.

Miro was already there with a mature, polished product while competitors scrambled to build from scratch. Usage exploded — from about 5 million users before COVID to over 60 million within three years.

The timing was pure luck. The 8 years of product development before the luck arrived was pure grind.

Freemium SaaS. Free plan includes 3 editable boards with unlimited team members.

Starter plan ($8/member/month) adds unlimited boards, custom templates, and voting. Business plan ($16/member/month) adds SSO, guest access, smart diagramming, and advanced collaboration features.

Enterprise pricing is custom with admin controls, compliance, and dedicated support. Revenue reportedly exceeded $500 million ARR by 2023.

The freemium funnel is aggressive — free boards are collaborative by nature, so every shared board is a marketing impression. Teams adopt Miro organically, then the company converts to paid when they need more boards or admin controls.

Infinite Canvas — the core whiteboard with unlimited space for visual collaboration. Sticky Notes & Voting — digital Post-its with real-time collaboration and dot voting for decision-making.

Mind Maps & Diagrams — flowcharts, org charts, wireframes, and concept maps. Miro AI — AI-powered features including smart sticky note clustering, auto-diagramming, and content generation.

Templates — 2,500+ pre-built templates for agile, design thinking, strategy, and education. Video & Chat — built-in video calling and chat for real-time collaboration on boards.

Integrations — 150+ integrations with Jira, Slack, Google Workspace, Microsoft Teams, Figma, Asana, and more. Presentation Mode — turn any board into a presentation.

Talktrack — record video walkthroughs of boards for async collaboration.

Product-led growth through collaborative virality. When one person creates a Miro board and invites colleagues, every participant sees the product and becomes a potential new user.

The collaborative nature makes it inherently viral — unlike solo productivity tools, Miro only works when multiple people use it together. This means every paid customer generates free marketing impressions with every board they share.

Miro also built an extensive template library — hundreds of pre-built frameworks for design thinking, agile retrospectives, customer journey mapping, and more. These templates attract users searching for specific frameworks and convert them into Miro users.

The enterprise sales motion targets IT and procurement teams after bottom-up adoption reaches critical mass.

Justifying the valuation post-COVID. Miro was valued at $17.5 billion during the peak of remote work enthusiasm.

As companies returned to offices and hybrid work settled into a routine, the question became: do people need Miro as desperately as they did in 2020? Growth has slowed from the COVID hypergrowth.

The competitive landscape also intensified — FigJam (from Figma), Microsoft Whiteboard, Lucidspark, and Apple Freeform all entered the space. FigJam is particularly threatening because Figma already owns the design workflow.

The other challenge: the war in Ukraine forced Miro to relocate its Russian engineering team, disrupting operations and requiring the company to rebuild parts of its organization.

Iconiq Growth, Accel, Atlassian Ventures, Dragoneer, BOND. Valued at $17.5 billion in January 2022.

Atlassian — maker of Jira and Confluence — invested because they saw Miro as complementary, not competitive. The valuation reflected COVID-era growth and the belief that visual collaboration would remain central to remote and hybrid work.