Miro (RealtimeBoard Inc.)
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Company History
Founded 2011 in San Francisco, California, United States & Amsterdam, Netherlands
Miro was founded in 2011 by Andrey Khusid and Oleg Shardin under the original name RealtimeBoard. Khusid was running an advertising and graphic design agency in Perm and frequently worked with remote clients in Moscow and Europe. While trying to present creative concepts, brand guidelines, and website wireframes, Khusid grew intensely frustrated by the limitations of static email attachments, PDF slide decks, and clunky video screen shares. He realized that when people work together in a physical office, the most creative discussions happen around a whiteboard covered in sticky notes and sketches. Khusid partnered with Oleg Shardin, a talented software engineer, to build an interactive, browser-based digital whiteboard that anyone could access from anywhere. In 2018, having proven strong product-market fit, they raised their Series A from Accel. In March 2019, they rebranded to Miro, paying homage to the expressive, playful style of Spanish surrealist painter Joan Miró. When the COVID-19 pandemic forced global knowledge workers into remote work in early 2020, Miro's viral adoption exploded, scaling from a niche tool into a multi-billion-dollar enterprise collaboration staple. In 2011, Andrey Khusid was running an interactive design agency called Vitamin Group in Perm. Every week, Khusid struggled to present complex web designs, brand architectures, and interactive marketing campaigns to remote corporate clients in Moscow and Western Europe. Reviewing work over static PDF attachments and conference calls led to endless miscommunications and delayed project approvals. Teaming up with brilliant software systems architect Oleg Shardin, they wrote the initial lines of code for RealtimeBoard—an infinite browser whiteboard where designers and clients could collaborate in real time. That pragmatic agency tool became the seed for Miro, proving that intense customer empathy and visual thinking could transform how the entire global economy collaborates across distance. In late 2018, when Accel partner Rich Wong flew to Europe to meet Andrey Khusid, he was astonished by what he discovered: a completely bootstrapped company operating out of Perm and Amsterdam that had quietly acquired over one million organic users with zero outbound sales reps. Wong recognized that RealtimeBoard had tapped into a profound psychological shift toward spatial, visual thinking in modern knowledge work. Accel's $25 million Series A investment catalyzed the company's global expansion, setting the stage for its historic transformation into Miro.
Andrey Khusid is the co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of Miro (RealtimeBoard, Inc.). Frustrated by the lack of visual collaboration tools for distributed teams, Khusid founded RealtimeBoard in 2011 alongside Oleg Shardin, creating an infinite online canvas to bridge physical distance. Under Khusid's visionary, resilient leadership, the company rebranded to Miro in 2019, relocated its executive headquarters to Amsterdam and San Francisco, raised over $475 million in institutional capital, navigated the global remote-work hypergrowth during the pandemic, and built Miro into a $17.5 billion visual collaboration powerhouse generating over $500 million in annual revenue, serving over 80 million users worldwide. Khusid's leadership was tested under extraordinary circumstances in 2022 following Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Acting with moral clarity and decisive speed, Khusid completely wound down Miro's Russian operations, relocated hundreds of engineering staff across Europe, and established major research hubs in Amsterdam and Berlin. An inspiring advocate for visual thinking, Khusid continues to direct global product vision, enterprise sales expansion, and international corporate culture ahead of Miro's initial public offering.
Oleg Shardin is a co-founder and former Chief Technology Officer of Miro. An exceptional systems architect, Shardin translated Khusid's vision of an infinite whiteboard into high-performance software code. At Miro, Shardin architected the original real-time canvas synchronization protocols, engineered the multi-threaded rendering engine that allows tens of thousands of spatial objects to pan and zoom at 60 FPS, and guided the early technical scaling from a small engineering lab into a robust global enterprise cloud platform before transitioning to board-level advisory and independent technology investments. At Miro, Shardin engineered the core spatial quadtree indexing and instanced GPU rendering pipelines that allow complex multi-user canvases to render smoothly at 60 FPS without memory exhaustion. His systems engineering mastery established the high-performance graphics architecture that enabled Miro to scale from an early agency prototype into a multi-billion-dollar enterprise cloud platform serving over 80 million global users.
Andrey Khusid and Oleg Shardin founded RealtimeBoard to solve remote client presentation bottlenecks.
Raised Series A funding led by Accel to expand engineering and establish international headquarters.
Rebranded from RealtimeBoard to Miro, launching an expanded enterprise collaboration suite.
User base exploded during the global shift to remote work, raising Series B led by Iconiq Growth.
Secured major growth round led by Iconiq Growth with Accel and Atlassian, reaching a $17.5B valuation.
Surpassed $400M ARR serving over 70 million users across 250,000 organizations worldwide.
Since its establishment in 2011, Miro (RealtimeBoard Inc.) expanded from an early-stage venture into a recognized leader in Visual Collaboration Software, Digital Whiteboarding & Enterprise Product Workspace SaaS, overcoming key market challenges.
Over its history, Miro (RealtimeBoard Inc.) executed decisive strategic pivots toward scalable monetization and digital distribution, securing its current market leadership.
By continually modernizing operations and embracing workflow automation, Miro (RealtimeBoard Inc.) maintains resilience through changing technological and economic cycles.