Australian enterprise software company Atlassian recently acquired
project management service software Trello, in a $425 million deal that is the
company’s largest acquisition to date.
Trello, developed under Fog Creek Software before being spun
off as an independent company, currently boasts more than 19 million users and
more than 100 employees. The company has already collected $10.3 million in
investments in exchange for 20 percent of its value, and its price was almost 10 times more than earlier projections.
Atlassian plans to retain the company’s brand and services,
as well as its current employees, and does not anticipate any significant
changes for Trello’s existing customer base, which includes users in the Balkan nations, in the near term. Atlassian plans
to push additional funds into investment in Trello and hopes to increase the
customer base by a factor of five to 100 million users.
Including its investment in Trello, Atlassian has now
acquired 18 services, including HipChata, BitBucket, SourceTree and dr. Last
year the company spent more than 38 percent of its income on investment and
development, and its investment in Trello is just a mere $32 million shy of its
entire revenue for last year, which, having grown 42 percent from the previous
year, sat at $457 million.
