Welcome to the Miroverse: Unlocking Expression in the Enterprise
Salesforce Ventures announces its significant investment in the $400 million Series C round of Miro, the online collaborative whiteboard platform that brings teams together, anytime, anywhere.
We all know “a picture is worth a thousand words.” Yet most software apps for knowledge workers only provide new ways to write and organize words — and little-to-no ability to collaborate visually.
This problem is particularly acute in the new era of distributed work. In the past, you gathered around a whiteboard in a conference room to brainstorm new ideas with your team. The group’s productivity was limited by the physical size of the whiteboard and whoever was in the room. Post-meeting, if you wanted to share your team’s work, all you could do was take a photo of the whiteboard. The old way of collaboration is static and limited by physical constraints and doesn’t work at all in our digital world.
Enter Miro, a visual collaboration platform for knowledge workers. Miro is a cloud-based digital canvas where you can co-create visually with your colleagues in real-time and asynchronously. Your team can use Miro to exchange ideas, make complex decisions, design products, and processes, host meetings, and gather and organize detailed feedback — all in a fun, accessible, interactive way. We are proud to announce that Salesforce Ventures is making a significant investment in Miro’s $400 million Series C fundraise.
The future of work = Digital HQ
This investment reflects our belief in the rise of the “Digital HQ” as the foundation of the future of work. It demonstrates our conviction that the future of the enterprise is collaborative — as evidenced by our earlier investments in collaboration software companies such as Airtable, Hopin, Monday, and Zoom. The collaboration software market is currently valued at $28 billion and is growing at a 15% CAGR. Last year, Keybanc published a survey in which 67% of CIOs said collaboration is their #1 budget priority.
At Salesforce Ventures, we believe visual collaboration will become one of the most important categories of enterprise software in the coming years as teams continue to look for ways to bring the interactive, visual elements of in-person teamwork into new hybrid environments.”Indicating this trend, Gartner reported a 10x increase in interest in visual collaboration over the past 18 months.
Easy to adopt and easy to scale
Miro has become the visual collaboration category leader thanks to its product-led growth strategy and easy-to-adopt nature. Initially gaining traction among designers, product managers, and engineers, Miro spreads virally in an organization as workers invite colleagues to collaborate. Sales teams host interactive meetings with customers on their Miro boards. Executives ideate on strategy and plan new projects. Learning and development teams create and deliver engaging interactive content.
Miro encourages multi-directional communication and is scalable to thousands of team members working together from anywhere, on any device. And Miro integrates with 100+ other tools, such as Airtable, Confluence, Jira, Monday, Office 365, Slack, Trello, and Zoom.
Since its April 2020 Series B, Miro has grown from five million users to more than 30 million. Its paying customers have increased by more than 550%, and Miro is now used by employees at 99% of Fortune 100 enterprises. Miro’s enterprise business has also shown significant growth and progress — the company now has 20 customers with contracts worth $1+ million in annual recurring revenue. Indeed, this is one of the fastest-growing enterprise software companies we’ve come across.
Customer love and community
What’s Miro’s secret? Customer love and community. The company’s founder and CEO, Andrey Khusid, is a product leader who guides the company toward delighting users through continued product iteration. For example, in recent months, Andrey and his team have added deeper functionality to facilitate new ways to run meetings in Miro with Smart Meetings, which includes chat, reactions (love those!), voting, and increased controls — all of which contribute to a more dynamic, inclusive, and interactive experience.
Miro is the highest-rated visual collaboration tool on G2 and its Net Promoter Score rivals much-loved consumer brands. The company created and fosters a community of its most passionate users. Dubbed “The Miroverse,” it gives users a sense of ownership of the product and has become an integral part of Miro’s organic growth. In the Miroverse, members advise and inspire each other, while also sharing templates (more than 1,000 so far) to help others quickly get up to speed and make new boards of their own.
Dual-headquartered in Amsterdam and San Francisco, Miro has assembled a global organization of more than 1,200 employees — a 5x increase in the last 24 months. Andrey and the “Mironeers” have built a world-class culture. The company earns high Glassdoor ratings: 92% of employees would recommend Miro to their friends.
We’re excited by the scale of the problem Miro solves, its product innovation, stellar hypergrowth execution, and amazing team. Miro’s story shows that great businesses can be built anywhere — unconstrained by borders or distance. We view Miro as a generational company that will disrupt collaboration in the enterprise for years to come.
Congratulations, Miro, and welcome to the Salesforce Ventures family!
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