Miro, a Californian startup with Russian roots previously known as RealtimeBoard, announced yesterday a $50 million Series B round. The funding came from Iconiq Capital – a Silicon Valley fund backed by such tech billionaires as Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey – with Accel and several individual investors also contributing to the round.
The detail of the deal were not disclosed, but a source close to the involved funds told East-West Digital News that Miro’s valuation was “considerable” with the company “steadily progressing on its unicorn path.”
Miro offers a visual collaboration platform that allows distributed teams to “create, collaborate, and centralize communication for all cross-functional team work.” This solution is touted as “an entire toolkit for user story or customer journey maps, wireframing, roadmap or sprint planning, retros, and more,” allowing teams to start collaborating “in 90 seconds.”
Founded in Perm, Russia, in 2011, Miro quickly got recognition in industry contests. It is now a profitable business with some 300 employees across offices in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Austin, Amsterdam and Perm.
Miro claims to serve “80% of the Fortune 100,” including such companies as Deloitte, Netflix, Cisco, PwC, Spotify and Upwork.
Demand for such solutions is skyrocketting in times of epidemic, as business and educational customers move from physical to remote work. Miro co-founder and CEO Andrey Khusid told TechCrunch it is “a challenge for his engineering team to keep up with the demand, but one that the company has been able to meet to this point.”
Among the early investors in the company is Bas Godska, one of the most prolific business angels in the former Soviet Union. While not hiding his satisfaction at Miro’s latest deal, the Dutch business angel told EWDN he was “not totally surprised.”
“Miro’s success story is yet another demonstration of the huge international potential of some of the startups grown in this region, which hosts some of the best engineers in the world,” he said.
Godska recently co-founded Acrobator Ventures, a fund that allocates a significant part of its capital to investing in Eastern Europe at the seed stage.
Such cases are rare, but not exceptional. Over the past few months, amid the pandemic, some Western investors seemed to take a closer look at this region, CrunchBase noted.
