Australia's Atlassian to buy VC-backed Trello

The deal values Trello at $425 million, of which $360 million will be paid in cash and the rest in Atlassian restricted shares and options. Trello was founded in 2011 as Fog Creek Software, but spun-out in 2014 supported by $10 million in Series A funding from Index Ventures and Spark Ventures.

The company provides a system of virtual post-it notes and digital whiteboards that enable individuals and companies to organize and prioritize workflow. It has more than 19 million registered users across 100 countries, ranging from the UN and the Red Cross to Google and National Geographic. The service is popular with finance, human resources, legal and marketing and sales teams.

The acquisition is intended to complement Atlassian's existing workflow management applications. In addition to JIRA, its core product, the company offers a suite of services such as private chatrooms, workplace collaboration platforms, and systems integration and optimization services. Trello integrations for Atlassian products will be available in the Atlassian Marketplace, one of the largest enterprise software marketplaces in the world.

"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, Mike Cannon-Brookes, Atlassian's co-founder and CEO, said in a statement.

Cannon-Brookes met co-founder Scott Farquhar while they were both studying at the University of New South Wales. They set up Atlassian in 2002 and the business now has more than 65,000 users, from multinationals like Citigroup, eBay and NASA to small and medium-sized enterprises.

Accel Partners committed $60 million to the business in 2010 and then made a partial exit when T. Rowe Price and Dragoneer put in $150 million. Both rounds were secondary transactions. Atlassian raised $462 million in its IPO in December 2015 and has a market capitalization of $5.5 billion. As of June 2016, Accel had a 5.13% stake in the business while T. Rowe Price owned 5.76%.

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