• Founded in Perm, Russia, in 2011, Miro has matured into a $17.5 billion tech juggernaut.
• Now, it’s carefully distancing itself from Russia as the country’s assault on Ukraine continues.
• Miro closed its office in Russia in March and is scrambling to relocate those employees.

Miro was one of those startups in the right place at the right time. Founded in 2011, the software firm makes a digital whiteboard that took off with the shift to remote work in a post-pandemic world. 

Investors jumped at the chance to capitalize on the work-from-home-enabler, which has headquarters in San Francisco and Amsterdam. The startup raised a $50 million Series B funding round in April 2020 and a $400 million Series C round in January from Silicon Valley investors, such as Iconiq, Accel, and Salesforce Ventures.

Miro exemplifies the globally distributed workforce, with about 1,500 employees scattered across offices in Austin, Berlin, London, Paris, Tokyo, and until last month, Perm, Russia — where its founders grew up and started Miro. But as geopolitical tensions swirl around Russia-linked entities, the startup is carefully distancing itself from its homeland.

In March, Miro closed its Perm office and paused new sales in Russia and Belarus (where it sold through third-party vendors), it said in a blog post. Miro also pledged to suspend licenses for any customers on international sanctions lists, which are measures meant to influence the behavior of a foreign country by putting restrictions on its economy.

Miro’s moves came as tech players with Russian and Ukrainian ties saw their businesses suddenly upended in the early days of what could be a lengthy conflict. In Europe, startups are quietly removing board members whose venture funds are linked to Russian oligarchs. One Russian investor (who’s not affiliated with Miro) told Insider earlier this week that he felt like an outcast. He worried companies would be punished for being affiliated with him.

For Miro, keeping up its Russia operations appeared no longer prudent.

During the pandemic, the remote-work startup saw its valuation bloom to $17.5 billion, briefly making it the eight most valuable startup in the US. That it had links to Russia was a mild inconvenience, said four former employees, who requested anonymity for professional reasons. But after the war in Ukraine erupted, Miro, which has a small, historical tie to a fund once backed by a sanctioned Russian oligarch, was forced to rethink any lingering connections.

This is the story of how one of Russia’s crown-jewel startups cut ties with the country.

Russian roots

Miro’s Russian roots run deep. The founders, Andrey Khusid and Oleg Shardin, grew up in Perm, a large industrial city at the foothills of the Ural Mountains — the last hub before Siberia. The two founded their first company, a creative agency focused on web development and app design, while they studied at a research university in Perm.

The agency, Vitamin Group, had some remote customers, and the founders grew annoyed that they couldn’t easily show them what they were working on and get feedback without being in the same room, said Khusid, now Miro’s CEO. So they built software for a digital canvas that let users sketch ideas, attach images and files, and share instantly.

Before long, the two realized that their “whiteboard on steroids” could stand up its own business. They needed money to grow the team and raised a small sum of capital from the founders of a successful gaming startup in Perm in 2011.

Initially called RealTimeBoard, their new company released a free product to the public one year later and signe