Mike Cannon-Brookes, co-founder and CEO of Atlassian, speaks on the National Electrical Vehicle Summit in Canberra, Australia, on Aug. 19, 2022. Cannon-Brookes is urging Australia to present extra ambition on local weather motion, whilst the brand new authorities legislates plans to strengthen the nation’s carbon emissions cuts.
Hilary Wardhaugh | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Atlassian stated it has agreed to acquire The Browser Company, a startup that provides an internet browser with artificial intelligence options, for $610 million in money.
The corporations purpose to shut the deal in Atlassian’s fiscal second quarter, which ends in December.
Established in 2019, The Browser Company has gone up in opposition to a few of the world’s largest corporations, together with Google, with Chrome, and Apple, which incorporates Safari on its computer systems operating MacOS.
The startup debuted Arc, a customizable browser with a built-in whiteboard and the power to share teams of tabs, in 2022. The Dia browser, a less complicated possibility that enables folks to chat with an AI assistant about a number of browser tabs directly, grew to become out there in beta in June.
Atlassian co-founder and CEO Mike Cannon-Brookes stated he sees shortcomings in the preferred browsers for those that do a lot of their work on computer systems.
“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 stated in an interview. “It’s not built to work, it’s not built to act, it’s not built to do.”
Cannon-Brookes stated Arc has helped him really feel like he can handle his work, with its skill to manage tabs and mechanically archive previous ones.
But solely a small proportion of people that used The Browser Company’s Arc adopted this system’s particular options.
“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, stated in a newsletter update. The startup stopped constructing new options for Arc, main to questions of whether or not it will launch the browser beneath an open-source license.
AI search startup Perplexity, which offered Google $34.5 billion for Chrome, talked with The Browser Company a few potential acquisition in December, The Information reported, OpenAI additionally held deal talks with The Browser Company, in accordance to the report.
Cannon-Brookes would not specify whether or not Atlassian thought of shopping for Google’s browser. Last 12 months, the U.S. Justice Department proposed a divestiture after a federal choose dominated that the corporate loved an web search monopoly.
“I’m not even sure if there is a bidding competition for Chrome,” Cannon-Brookes stated. “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 offering early entry to its personal AI browser, which is known as Comet.
The Browser Company was valued at $550 million final 12 months. Investors embody Atlassian Ventures, Salesforce Ventures, Figma co-founder Dylan Field and LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman.
The browser is central for these utilizing Atlassian merchandise, such because the Jira mission administration software program, which reveals current help requests on the net. But the plan is not merely to make it nicer to work with Atlassian merchandise on-line.
“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 stated.
