Atlassian to buy Trello for $578.2m

Collaboration and productivity software provider Atlassian has arranged to acquire web-based project management platform operator Trello for around US$425 million ($578.2 million) in cash and stock.

Trello is one of the fastest growing cloud collaboration services, having nearly doubled its registered user base to 19 million over the past year. The project management platform has been adopted by a wide range of organisations in more than 100 countries worldwide.

Atlassian is pursing the acquisition as part of its efforts to build its suite of services designed to support all types of teamwork.

Trello will be added to Atlassian’s existing suite of enterprise project tracking (JIRA), content (Confluence) and communications (HipChat) offerings.

Atlassian co-founder and CEO Mike Cannon-Brookes said the company aims to have a comprehensive portfolio of team collaboration software.

“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,” he said.

“Trello has built an incredibly sticky and useful product for organising 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.”

Under the terms of the deal, Atlassian will pay around US$360 million in cash for Trello and issue the remainder of the US$425 million acquisition price in Atlassian restricted shares and options.

The transaction is expected to close in the current quarter, and Atlassian plans to continue operating Trello as a standalone service after the deal goes through.

Image courtesy of Matthew Guay under CC