Mike Cannon-Brookes, co-founder and CEO of Atlassian, speaks at the National Electrical Vehicle Summit in Canberra, Australia, on Aug. 19, 2022. Cannon-Brookes is urging Australia to show more ambition on climate action, even as the new government legislates plans to strengthen the country’s carbon emissions cuts.
Hilary Wardhaugh | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Atlassian said it has agreed to acquire The Browser Company, a startup that offers a web browser with artificial intelligence features, for $610 million in cash.
The companies aim to close the deal in Atlassian’s fiscal second quarter, which ends in December.
Established in 2019, The Browser Company has gone up against some of the world’s largest companies, including Google, with Chrome, and Apple, which includes Safari on its computers running MacOS.
The startup debuted Arc, a customizable browser with a built-in whiteboard and the ability to share groups of tabs, in 2022. The Dia browser, a simpler option that allows people to chat with an AI assistant about multiple browser tabs at once, became available in beta in June.
Atlassian co-founder and CEO Mike Cannon-Brookes said he sees shortcomings in the most popular browsers for those who do much of their work on computers.
“Whatever it is that you’re actually doing in your browser is not particularly well served by a browser that was built in the name to browse,” he said in an interview. “It’s not built to work, it’s not built to act, it’s not built to do.”
Cannon-Brookes said Arc has helped him feel like he can manage his work, with its ability to organize tabs and automatically archive old ones.
But only a small percentage of people who used The Browser Company’s Arc adopted the program’s special features.
“Our metrics were more like a highly specialized professional tool (like a video editor) than a mass-market consumer product, which we aspired to be closer to,” Josh Miller, The Browser Company’s co-founder and CEO, Josh Miller, said in a newsletter update. The startup stopped building new features for Arc, leading to questions of whether it would release the browser under an open-source license.
AI search startup Perplexity, which offered Google $34.5 billion for Chrome, talked with The Browser Company about a possible acquisition in December, The Information reported, OpenAI also held deal talks with The Browser Company, according to the report.
Cannon-Brookes wouldn’t specify whether Atlassian considered buying Google’s browser. Last year, the U.S. Justice Department proposed a divestiture after a federal judge ruled that the company enjoyed an internet search monopoly.
“I’m not even sure if there is a bidding competition for Chrome,” Cannon-Brookes said. “I didn’t see Google putting up an auction just yet. Look, I think we focus on actually getting acquisitions done and actually making those products a part of a coherent whole and delivering value for our customers. I’m not sure that stunt PR acquisition offers are really our thing, but we’ll leave that for them to do.”
Perplexity has been providing early access to its own AI browser, which is named Comet.
The Browser Company was valued at $550 million last year. Investors include Atlassian Ventures, Salesforce Ventures, Figma co-founder Dylan Field and LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman.
The browser is central for those using Atlassian products, such as the Jira project management software, which shows existing support requests on the web. But the plan isn’t simply to make it nicer to work with Atlassian products online.
“It’s really about taking Arc’s SaaS application experience and power user features, and Dia’s AI and elegance and speed and sort of svelte nature, and Atlassian’s enterprise know-how, and working out how to put all that together into Dia, or into the AI part of the browser,” Cannon-Brookes said.
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