Miro

When Andrey Khusid and Oleg Shardin built what would become Miro — originally called RealtimeBoard — it was a relatively focused tool: an infinite digital canvas for distributed teams to collaborate visually. Then remote work went mainstream, and the whiteboard became the center of gravity for how millions of teams think, plan, and build together. The core problem Miro addresses is the loss of visual, collective thinking in distributed work. In a shared physical space, a whiteboard, sticky notes, or a sheet on the table can anchor a conversation and build shared understanding quickly. Distributed teams lose that mode of collaboration. Email chains and slide decks are poor substitutes for the fluid, spatial, simultaneous thinking that happens around a real board. Miro created a persistent, infinite, shared canvas where teams can brainstorm, map processes, design products, run agile retrospectives, and conduct workshops — synchronously or asynchronously, across time zones. The business model follows a freemium SaaS structure: the core product is free, while advanced features for teams and enterprises sit behind tiered subscription plans. This architecture enables viral, bottom-up growth within organizations — one team adopts it for free, spreads it to colleagues, and eventually the company converts to paid plans at scale. It is one of the most effective product-led growth engines in enterprise software. The numbers reflect genuine global scale: more than 90 million registered users, over 130,000 organizations on the platform, and annual recurring revenue exceeding 500 million dollars. The company's valuation has reached 17.5 billion dollars, placing Miro among Europe's most valuable software companies. The customer base includes the majority of the Fortune 500, spanning technology companies, consulting firms, financial institutions, and creative agencies. Miro has demonstrated that building a category-defining global software product does not require a San Francisco or London address. Its template ecosystem, deep integrations with tools like Jira, Figma, and Slack, and the network effects of teams already working within it have created a competitive moat that goes well beyond the product itself.