MURAL

Mariano Suarez-Battan had already built and sold a video game studio when he hit a wall. He was trying to design new products with teammates scattered across different countries.

There was no good way to brainstorm together online. So in 2011, in Buenos Aires, he teamed up with Agustin Soler, Patricio Jutard, and Johnny Halife to build one.

The idea was simple. Take the sticky notes and whiteboards that consultants and designers live on, and put them in the browser.

For years it was a slow grind. Then 2020 happened.

Mural sells a giant shared whiteboard that lives in the cloud. Teams drop sticky notes, draw diagrams, and map out ideas on an infinite canvas, all at the same time, from anywhere.

It runs on the freemium playbook. You start free, then pay per user for the Team, Business, and Enterprise tiers.

The real money is in big companies. More than half the Fortune 100 use it, including Microsoft, IBM, and Adobe.

So the pitch is basically this. Every workshop, design sprint, and strategy session that used to need a conference room can now happen in a browser tab.

The core product is the visual workspace, an infinite canvas with sticky notes, templates, and real-time cursors so you can see who is doing what. There are ready-made templates for the usual rituals, like brainstorms, retrospectives, and customer journey maps.

In 2024 Mural leaned hard into AI. The tools can cluster a messy pile of sticky notes in about five seconds, spin up mind maps from a text prompt, and summarize a board for you.

It also plugs into Microsoft 365 Copilot, Slack, Jira, and more than a hundred other tools.

The growth hack was a global pandemic. Mural had ground along for almost a decade before 2020.

Then offices emptied overnight and nobody could stand around a real whiteboard anymore. Demand exploded.

Mural tripled its annual recurring revenue that year, doubled its headcount, and added more than a million monthly active users. Investors piled in.

Insight Partners led a $118 million round in August 2020. Less than a year later, in July 2021, a $50 million round valued the company at $2 billion.

The whole thing was riding the remote-work wave.

The wave broke. Once people drifted back to offices, the explosive growth cooled fast.

By August 2024 Mural cut about 15% of its staff. It has also burned through several CEOs in a short stretch, with founder Mariano Suarez-Battan eventually handing off the top job.

And then there is Miro. Miro pulled ahead as the market leader, shipping features faster and signing up tens of millions of users.

Mural now has to prove the digital whiteboard is a business worth owning, not a feature Microsoft or Atlassian can bundle for free.

Mural raised about $199 million in total. The early money came from Alta Ventures and Intel Capital in 2012, back when it was an unknown Argentine startup.

Radian Capital led a $23 million Series A in 2019. The big checks arrived during the pandemic.

Insight Partners led the $118 million Series B in 2020 and came back to lead the $50 million Series C in 2021, with Tiger Global riding along. Google's AI fund Gradient Ventures and the Slack Fund also got in.

A few notable operators put in personal money too, including Qualtrics CEO Ryan Smith.