TL;DR
- On the surface, Miro acquired an online learning platform. In reality, it acquired two founders, three AI products, and a team that shipped five products in nine months.
- Reforge Learning stays as a standalone brand. But its Insights, Research, and Build solutions integrate into Miro’s platform.
- Brian Balfour joins as Chief Growth Officer and Tom Willerer as Chief Strategy Officer.
When I first read that Miro acquired Reforge, I presumed Miro wanted to get into edtech. After all, Miro is a digital whiteboard-turned-innovation-space, and Reforge is a professional development platform that expanded into a product solutions platform.
But Reforge Learning stays an independent platform. Instead, Miro wants Reforge’s recently-built products: Insights, Research, and Build.
At Class Central, we’ve seen companies acquiring platforms for their users. Reforge had a community of 100,000 learners. Then why did Miro only aim for the product solutions and the team?
Miro’s Story: From $17.5B Valuation to Layoffs
Miro, founded by Oleg Shardin and Andrey Khusid in 2011, began when they built RealTimeBoard, a virtual whiteboard for remote team collaboration.
From 2017 to 2022, it raised $476 million in total. With a $50M Series B funding round in April 2020 (when the lockdown hit), the company increased its user base by 500% (from 5M to 30M) and its paying customer base by 550%.
In 2022, Miro, backed by Accel, Atlassian, Salesforce Ventures, and more, raised $400 million (Series C). It was valued at $17.5 billion. In 2023, it laid off 119 people, 7% of its workforce, because the company had over-hired and no longer required that large a team.
The same year, Miro’s AI-fication began. It launched Miro Assist, (an AI innovation partner) in 2023, and by 2025, it repositioned itself as “The Innovation Workspace”, launching AI Canvas, Flows, Sidekicks (multiple workflows and AI agents in a shared canvas) and MCP integrations (to connect Miro boards to Claude Code, Cursor, etc).
A year later, in October 2024, it cut ~275 people, nearly 18%, to “simplify the company structure”.
The company even saw major leadership exits in 2024-2025.
In 2024:
- CPO-turned-COO Varun Parmar quit after being in his new role for just 10 months
- Hernán Magrini quit as Head of Engineering
In 2025:
- CIO Robbie Strickland left in Jan 2025
- In the same month, Andrew Edelman stepped down as VP, Partnerships & Business Development
By 2026, Miro had made its fourth acquisition, Butter, a Denmark-registered workshop facilitation platform. It launched Miro Engage, a product that lets facilitators run interactive sessions on the Miro canvas, with features like polls, reactions, and session recaps.
This was Miro’s foray into diverse products, something Reforge had recently achieved.
Reforge’s Journey: From a Premium EdTech Platform to Layoffs
In 2016, Brian Balfour, the former VP of Growth at HubSpot, started Reforge as a premium professional development platform. It became an eight-figure revenue, profitable, and bootstrapped company by 2021.
The company raised $21M Series A in February 2021 (from Andreessen Horowitz, one of the most well-known venture capital firms in Silicon Valley) and $60M Series B a year later in March 2022 (from Insight Partners).
Eight months later, Reforge had its first round of layoffs. Balfour said it was due to macro conditions but took personal responsibility. Five months later, in April 2023, it had its second round of layoffs.
In 2023, Balfour mentioned the company was making $30 million. But in October 2024, there was a third layoff, and just 25% of the team was retained.
This time, other major edtech players, along with tech companies, were laying off employees too. Udemy cut 280 people in September 2024 and moved half the affected roles to lower-cost locations.
With the remaining team, Reforge shipped five AI products in nine months (Build, Insights, Research, Launch, Artifacts).
When asked how the team at Reforge shipped five products in under a year with a lean team, Balfour said, “You need other founder-type talent in the company to do this.” The team had six founders from two previous acquisitions: Prefab and Monterey.
But according to employee reviews on Glassdoor, Reforge was disorganized and chasing trends, and was uncertain in terms of direction. Even the layoffs had hit from nowhere. One employee said leadership “strung everyone along, telling them there’s 1000 years of runway” before letting them go.
I even went through Miro’s Glassdoor reviews, and the pattern was similar. Employees of both companies said:
- The companies hired quickly and had sudden layoffs (something Dhawal Shah had noticed in 2022)
- There was a lack of trust in leadership
- The future direction was unclear and opaque
If Both Platforms Were Struggling, Why Did Miro Acquire Reforge?
Miro and Reforge were introducing AI features and products. At Reforge, the team built three products that will be integrated into Miro.
- Insights – Turns customer feedback into usable insights
- Research – Has AI-driven surveys and interviews at scale
- Build – Enables prototyping to test ideas before committing engineering resources
Miro has built and acquired AI features, but it barely has 1-2 new products that aren’t an extension of the whiteboard, mainly interactive facilitation (acquired from Butter in January 2026).
Miro needed the products and the team that built those products in under a year.
Miro’s acquisitions highlight this pattern: instead of building the products, acquire smaller platforms that have built them and onboard their teams.
Miro still has 1000+ employees and over 100 million users from Fortune 500 companies. Reforge has had 100,000 learners and is operating with a much leaner team than Miro. Both platforms might be strategically struggling, but Miro has more resources to adapt and more clients to sell to; something Reforge might take time to build.
It’s the same logic as Coursera acquiring Udemy: each buying what the other could never build. Coursera gets Udemy’s content library and 17,000 business customers. Udemy gets the credential engine it could never create.
Miro’s Founder Acqui-Hiring Spree
When Miro acquired Freehand (from InVision), it onboarded Freehand Chief Product Officer and InVision CEO Jeff Chow (also ex VP of Product, Consumer Experience, at TripAdvisor) as Miro’s Chief Product and Technology Officer. And when it acquired Uizard, co-founder and CEO Tony Beltramelli joined Miro as Head of Product for AI.
Miro is trying to diversify, and now, by onboarding Balfour and Willerer, Miro has access to Reforge’s expertise and leaders’ experience.
Before Reforge, Balfour was the VP of Growth at HubSpot, where he led the growth of new products such as the HubSpot CRM and HubSpot Sales Hub. Willerer has been Coursera’s Chief Product Officer, who introduced subscriptions to the platform.
In a recent interview, Khusid said he’s still looking to hire entrepreneurs. The company has onboarded 40 ex-founders in the last 2.5 years. He is building for uncertainty and rapid change, he mentioned.
“They need a little bit less guidance,” said Khusid. “They’re a little bit more comfortable with uncertainty.”
By acquiring Reforge and onboarding Balfour and Willerer, Miro has stayed true to its pattern. It’s not just buying products. It is buying the minds who know what to build and how to build it.
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