There is a ritual to it by now.

A Bending Spoons acquisition is announced; the users of the acquired product publish their eulogies; somewhere between announcement and closing, the team is dismissed and the pricing changes, and everyone who wrote a eulogy gets to feel vindicated.

Evernote, Meetup, WeTransfer, Issuu, Brightcove, Komoot, Harvest, Vimeo, AOL, Eventbrite, Tractive, Airtable — and, as of 10 September, Miro. The list compounds, and so does the ritual.

Miro has produced the loudest round yet. The product community — John Cutler and many familiar voices — read the announcement as the ruin of a beloved product by an indifferent owner, which is a reading with a good deal of precedent behind it. It’s an honest reaction. It’s also, arguably, the wrong place to begin.

Bending Spoons agreed to acquire Miro at an enterprise value of $1.355 billion, or roughly $1.79 billion in equity value once the company's net cash is counted, with certain Miro shareholders reinvesting $295 million of their proceeds back into newly issued Bending Spoons equity. Miro last raised in January 2022, at a post-money valuation of $17.5 billion. The business currently runs at something like $600 million in annual recurring revenue, close to ninety per cent of it from business and enterprise customers, across 250,000 organisations.

Airtable, which closed a week before the Miro announcement, follows the same arc: $1.285 billion of enterprise value against a private mark of nearly $12 billion, on roughly $480 million of ARR still growing north of twenty per cent.

These are not dying companies. They are companies whose revenue is perfectly real and whose valuations were written under a cost of capital that no longer exists. The markdown took four years and happened almost entirely in private; the acquisition is simply the moment it became a number anyone could read. A good portion of the anger currently aimed at the buyer belongs, properly speaking, to those four years.

The question is worth asking seriously, not least because the precedent is domestic and thoroughly unglamorous. Visma was taken private off the Oslo exchange in 2006 by Hg, for around £380 million, and has since made something in the order of 350 acquisitions, assembling more than 170 businesses, 2.1 million customers and €2.5 billion of revenue at a €19 billion mark. SAP became the backbone of how large enterprises run in no small part by buying its way there. Neither is a category-defining consumer platform; both compound; both are, on any honest measure, among the most successful software companies this continent has produced.

Nobody, to our knowledge, has ever written a eulogy for a Visma acquisition. Visma buys payroll and accounting software for Nordic SMEs — products people use because they must, rather than because they chose them. Bending Spoons runs a recognisably similar motion and then points it at a whiteboard that a hundred million people picked up voluntarily. The model did not change; the affection of the installed base did.

If the European template for a successful software company is compounding, acquisitive, cash-generative enterprise infrastructure, then Bending Spoons is not an aberration at all. It is simply the first version of that template that a wider audience has had to look at directly.

Whether the template still works is a separate matter, and the most interesting scepticism comes from Evan Armstrong, who has argued that Bending Spoons is underwriting the hardest version of its own playbook at exactly the moment the market has decided the answer is yes. His framing of the trade is hard to improve on:

His specific objection, written before Miro and Airtable arrived, was that the portfolio consisted of consumer and prosumer products with thin switching costs, which is an uncomfortable position for a company whose competence is making existing software more expensive to keep — particularly if one believes that AI is busy collapsing the cost of building software in the first place.

Miro and Airtable invert half of that argument. An individual abandoning Evernote loses their notes and a weekend. A forty-thousand-seat enterprise abandoning Miro loses years of embedded boards, workflows, integrations and internal training that nobody has any appetite to run again, in an organisation where migration carries a political cost as well as a technical one. Procurement is slow, contracts are annual, and the price lever everyone is bracing for is precisely the lever that works best in that setting.

There is a rival account of what European success looks like, and it is a genuine fork in the road. Anton Osika says a version of the same generational language from Stockholm: that you can build a global, category-defining company from anywhere, and that doing it from Europe is playing on hard mode by choice. The same vocabulary, and entirely opposite mechanics. Luca Ferrari's permanence describes an ownership structure that already exists — four co-founders holding class A shares with five votes each, an intention to hold forever, no acquired business ever sold. Osika's is an aspiration held inside a financing structure designed to produce a liquidity event: $200 million from Accel at $1.8 billion, then $330 million from CapitalG and Menlo at $6.6 billion.

They are also, rather neatly, a bet against each other. Lovable is the cost collapse that worries Armstrong, incorporated and shipping — roughly $200 million of ARR within about a year, on the proposition that you need not buy the thing at all. If Osika is right about the coming decade, the Bending Spoons portfolio is a melting ice cube. If Ferrari is right, Lovable's valuation assumes a substitution that never quite reaches enterprise procurement.

Neither, it should be said, is especially European in its financing. Bending Spoons listed on Nasdaq in July, raised $1.68 billion, and buys assets priced against American comparables; dual-class founder control is an American governance instrument, imported intact. Lovable's growth capital is American too. What is European here is the operating discipline and the register of the ambition, rather than the cap table.

The nationality of the assets deserves a caveat of its own, mind you, because it is considerably less obvious than the press releases make it sound. Miro is routinely described as California-based, and its parent is indeed a Delaware corporation with a San Francisco registered address; it is also co-headquartered in Amsterdam, which happens to be its largest hub and the city where Andrey Khusid lives, and it was founded in Perm in 2011. Eventbrite is American beyond argument — Delaware, San Francisco, NYSE until it went private — and yet its first European development centre opened in Madrid in 2019, following the Ticketea acquisition, with engineering distributed across Madrid, Barcelona and Alicante. The domicile is American and so are the comparables; a meaningful share of the work is European, which is worth holding on to when the post-acquisition headcount decisions arrive.

And the older template is under pressure from the same weather that made Miro affordable. SAP is down roughly a third over the past year. Visma's London listing has slipped from early 2026 to 2027 amid a software selloff and unresolved questions about what AI does to seat-based enterprise revenue, with Hg moving some €500 million of subsidiaries into a new Luxembourg vehicle in the meantime. The compounding model is not quietly winning. It is being repriced alongside everything else, only without an audience, because its users were never in love to begin with.