Miro: Where Teams Get Work Done
The artist Joan Miró, an eponym for our latest investment, said that artwork “must be conceived with fire in the soul, but executed with clinical coolness.”
This juxtaposition of unrelenting passion and polished execution, met with a shared vision for the potential of online visual collaboration, was what attracted us so powerfully to Miro and its world-class team, led by Andrey, Grisha, Zhenya and others.
In working closely with many companies increasingly leveraging the benefits of global and distributed talent, we have long experienced the power and importance of virtual collaboration. While the recent weeks and months have served to accelerate this movement, we believe these trends are enduring and that software will play an important role in enabling organizations to successfully thrive in an increasingly distributed world. While we are certainly encouraged by the rise and success of several productivity, messaging and video applications, we believe online visual collaboration will be a critical pillar of this future state of work and Miro is exceptionally well-positioned to build an important company in giving users the medium to build visually.
Over the recent years, Miro has built an impressive online whiteboarding platform that brings teams together to visually collaborate anywhere, anytime. The company’s products offer an engaging, intuitive collaboration experience through an infinite canvas, robust set of widgets, ready-made templates, frameworks and connectivity with popular workflow tools.
Miro is addressing a critical need for teams to ideate and collaborate visually in real time, without the constraints of physical locations. Today, over 5M users leverage Miro, in real-time and asynchronously, to brainstorm and develop new ideas, conduct research and design initiatives, run remote workshops, manage Agile workflows and oversee strategic planning in addition to a myriad of other applications. Miro’s collaboration use cases are endless and span across product, design, marketing, finance and HR teams within large companies as well as across consulting, higher education and non-profit organizations.
Our conversations with Miro customers surfaced many interesting insights, but there were two critical aspects that stood out: the appetite for visual collaboration is massive and visceral, and Miro’s product experience is second to none. Customers shared with us that Miro helps them democratize ideation processes and be more inclusive with their distributed teams (gone are the days of having to take photographs of whiteboards and squinting to see what your colleagues are writing, or constraining problem solving and decisions to a tops-down hierarchy). We heard users share how Miro gives them the openness and freedom to create and collaborate in the ways they want. One customer emphatically shared that “Miro subconsciously unlocks our creativity better than any other tool can.” We heard endless stories of Miro striking the intangible “aha!” chord with users.
This qualitative texture also became visible to us quantitatively through Miro’s widespread, viral growth globally from a combination of bottom-up adoption and rapid expansion through additional use cases and functional teams. This behavior mirrored some of the other exceptional product-led companies we have been fortunate to partner with over the years, including GitLab, Intercom, InVision, Datadog, Snowflake, BambooHR and Lucid.
“Fire in the Soul” meets “Clinical Coolness.” Andrey and his team have beautifully channeled the passion for creation with a slick, powerful medium. They have captured “lightning in a bottle” led by an intense focus on product and strong, first-hand appreciation for the challenges associated with online visual collaboration through building the company across distributed offices globally in Amsterdam, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Austin and Perm. We are thrilled to partner with Andrey, Grisha, Zhenya and the amazing team at Miro, as they harness this lightning to empower teams in creating the next big thing through visual collaboration!
