January 20, 2017January 30, 2017 by Tarang Rai

Atlassian acquired Trello

Trello a web-based project management application is being acquired by software company Atlassian Corp for USD 425 million. The transaction is expected to close by March 31, 2017. The acquisition value is comprised of $360 million in cash and the residue to be in restricted shares and options. According to Forbes, this is Atlassian’s 18th acquisition and the largest to date in 14 years.

Trello is an online tool launched in 2011 by Fog Creek Software and in 2014, it was spun out to form the basis of a separate company. Trello has grown from 1 million daily active users to over 19 million total registered users and has raised $10.3 million in 2014: a fund led by Index Ventures and Spark Capital which valued the company at $50 million, according to data from PitchBook.

The app is accessible in both free and paid versions. Trello offers organized digital Post-it notes and digital whiteboards which help users to prioritize their work flow in teams, or they can even share their documents within groups. Trello says, “the app is used by everyone from the family planning their next vacation to employees at the largest enterprises in the world. Companies like Google, National Geographic, and even the United Kingdom’s government use Trello daily. Organizations like the United Nations and the Red Cross rely on Trello to accomplish their missions. We’ve been humbled and excited to see the millions of use cases for Trello around the world, and we build the product each day proudly knowing we’re helping teams do great things.”

“We share Atlassian’s mission of unleashing the power of all teams. As part of Atlassian, we will accelerate our efforts and continue to champion teams everywhere. Atlassian’s deep investments in research and development will help augment Trello’s product offering. And the broader team collaboration portfolio Trello will integrate with will let us help customers in new and exciting ways,” said Michael Pryor, Trello’s CEO.

Software company Atlassian Corp, was founded in 2002 by Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar. The company develops products for software developers, project managers, and content management and it’s best known for its issue tracking application, called Jira. Atlassian raised $60 million in venture capital from Accel Partners in July 2010 and in December 2015 the company has become the most successful listing of an Australian company in the US. Atlassian serves over 65,000 customers globally, including Citigroup, eBay, Coca-Cola, VISA, BMW and NASA.

Mike Cannon-Brookes, Atlassian co-founder and co-chief executive said, “Atlassian’s mission is to unleash the potential in every team. In Trello we found a group that is as dedicated to helping teams get stuff done as we are. In fact, we have identical milestones towards achieving our missions: for our tools to be used by 100M people. Trello will become an important part of the Atlassian portfolio, offering a fun new way for teams to organize the often messy range of information that feeds into great teamwork. Its card system is intuitive, easy to use, and instantly familiar, which has made it extremely popular with teams across marketing, legal, HR, sales and beyond.”

Why Trello when Atlassian owns a similar product called Jira? Trello app is much simpler that come with maintaining Cloud and Server products at the same time and it also allows users to connect with other apps with less complexity. The Atlassian Marketplace lists about 330 add-ons being available for JIRA Cloud but over 100 more for JIRA Server. So, the limited set of APIs for JIRA Cloud compared to JIRA Server could be one part of the problem. However, Trello integration brings up almost twice as many search results on Google as jira integration.

Trello is expected to remain as a standalone service after the transaction is closed. As per Jay Simons, president at Atlassian, the company will stay focused on developing Trello and put more resources and help the team scale. On its second quarter fiscal 2017 quarterly earnings conference call, the company will discuss more on the transaction on January 19, 2017.

Trello expecting to become even more awesome and more fun than it is today, says Pryor. “As part of Atlassian, Trello will be able to leverage investments in R&D that will enhance the product in meaningful ways. Our team will be able to focus on improving the core experience of Trello for all users. We are certain that Atlassian understands the unique and novel reasons why Trello is so successful and well-loved.”

Mike said, “Atlassian knows more about how teams work than any company on the planet, which is why our collaboration suite powers teams of all shapes and sizes, from bleeding-edge startups to the Fortune 50.” He added “there is no silver bullet for teamwork. Teams have diverse ways of working and require a broad set of tools that adapt to their specific needs. Trello has built an incredibly sticky and useful product for organizing nearly any type of information simply and quickly. The addition of Trello will be a great complement to our existing portfolio of team collaboration software as we look to reach the 1 billion knowledge workers globally.”