In my Startup Spotlight series, I’m taking a look at one recently funded startup per edition to take a closer look at their domain name choice in particular. This week, we’re focusing on Miro.
Miro is a company that offers a very timely product with the new requirement for much of the world to work from home. Miro offers a collaborative whiteboard platform that helps distributed teams to work better together.
The company has recently raised a $50 million Series B funding round lead by San Francisco’s ICONIQ Capital with Google VP Bradley Horowitz also investing.
Miro was founded in 2011 as Realtime Board, using the domain RealtimeBoard.com. In March 2019, the company announced they had rebranded to Miro, relaunching with the Miro.com domain name. The Miro.com domain was previously owned by a small German marketing company and from looking at the history, the domain had been dormant for some time. The rebrand and domain acquisition followed their Series A funding round of $25 million.
By the time they decided to rebrand, Miro’s CMO Barbra Gago revealed that the company had millions of users. It’s a bold move to rebrand with that wide a userbase.
Their reasons for rebranding are interesting:
- There was a lack of consistency around what employees, users, and customers called the product.
- A thirteen-character name was troubling from a marketing perspective. The length of the name caused difficulties at tradeshows, for example, where space restrictions often meant the logo was extremely small compared to other companies.
- The company had moved beyond just offering a realtime whiteboard service.
So where did the name Miro come from? According to Barbra, it’s from Joan Miró, a Spanish painter and sculptor, whose work is described as iconoclastic. The Spanish sculptor obviously struck a chord with the staff members, as Miro ultimately became Realtime Board’s new brand name.
What do you think of Miro’s rebrand?