Miro is indeed still in the right place at the right time. With remote work continuing to rise, or a hybrid of that and in-person, the online workspace company finds itself with 30 million users and counts nearly all of the Fortune 100 companies as clients.
And now today, the company announced its largest round to date, $400 million in a Series C that propels its valuation to $17.5 billion. The new capital infusion gives Miro $476 million in total funding since the company was founded in 2011 by Andrey Khusid and Oleg Shardin.
CEO Khusid told TechCrunch he considers the company a “pioneer of visual collaboration,” with its early days as a digital whiteboard.
Andrey Khusid, co-founder and CEO of Miro. Image Credits: Andrey Khusid
“We’ve seen the market evolving over the last 10 years, and what started as an idea to bring a whiteboard into a browser has enabled us to understand the kind of value we can bring to organizations of all sizes,” he added. “Visual collaboration is something that allows teams in companies to better be on the same page. It’s a great opportunity to better explain ideas, problems and design solutions.”
Today, the company’s tools integrate with over 100 apps — including new partnerships with the likes of Atlassian, Cisco, Google Workspace, Microsoft Teams and Zoom — and offer nearly 1,000 templates designed to get users and their teams quickly working together no matter where they are.
The last time we checked in with Miro, co-headquartered in San Francisco and Amsterdam, was in 2020 when the company raised a $50 million Series B round led by Iconiq Capital. Since then, Khusid said the company grew its user base by 500%, from 5 million to 30 million users, and also its paying customer base by 550%. Among its Fortune 100 clients, 20 have more than $1 million in annual recurring revenue contract value, he added.
Iconiq Growth is back for the Series C round and is joined by Accel, Atlassian, Dragoneer, GIC, Salesforce Ventures and TCV. Individual investors involved include Airtable co-founders Howie Liu and Andrew Ofstad, Snowflake CEO Frank Slootman and DocuSign CEO Dan Springer.
“Since our initial investment, Miro has scaled with tremendous momentum, strong market leadership, and incredible product velocity,” said Matthew Jacobson, general partner at Iconiq Growth and Miro board member, in a written statement. “We believe Miro sits at a powerful intersection between asynchronous and synchronous work that captures and ignites creative processes everywhere. In our view, Miro’s culture of customer centricity makes it well-positioned to address a myriad of use cases across hybrid work for more than a billion knowledge workers globally. We are thrilled to continue our partnership with Andrey and the entire Miro team.”
Prior to the raise, Miro was already profitable and growing three times year over year before the global pandemic. However, with statistics showing that 53% of the U.S. workforce is expected to be remote by the end of this year, and with what Khusid expected to happen in 2022 actually happening in 2020, it created awareness around the problem of connectivity and collaboration in this new way of work.
In addition, with the venture capital market “favorable” right now, and given Miro’s vision of building a generational company, it made sense to go after additional funding to have the resources in place to build a strong brand for customers, he said.
Khusid plans to invest the new capital into product and technology development, getting its tools in front of more enterprise clients and expanding its global footprint. He is also looking at M&A opportunities.
Over the past 12 months, the company doubled its headcount to just over 1,200 employees in 11 hubs around the world, including new ones opened in Berlin, Munich, London, Sydney and Tokyo.
“We need to make sure all of our people are in place in all functions from customer support to product engineering,” Khusid said. “We’ve tried to serve the demand and make sure every experience is good. We aim to increase the pace of innovation, and that will be a big area of investment. It’s a big challenge to scale at that pace, especially being fully remote. I call it ‘building a plane while flying.’”