Atlassian acquires Trello

Atlassian founders Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar

It’s an acquisition that will “change how the world works” according to Mike Cannon-Brookes, co-founder of Atlassian which today announced it is buying Trello for US$425 million.

On what Cannon-Brookes described as a “massive day”, Atlassian announced it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Trello, the collaboration tool based around virtual sticky cards on a digital whiteboard.

Trello is one of the fastest growing cloud collaboration services, nearly doubling its number of registered users to 19 million over the past year.

Integrations between Trello and Atlassian’s JIRA, Bitbucket and Confluence will be coming in the near future the company said. It will also soon be launching a new version of its existing Trello integration for HipChat.

“Atlassian’s mission is to unleash the potential in every team,” Cannon-Brookes said. “That’s a big mission. In Trello we found a group that is as dedicated to helping teams get stuff done as we are. In fact, we have identical milestones towards achieving our missions: for our tools to be used by 100M people.”

Keep it Trello-y

Trello will continue to be offered as a standalone product and feature development will continue.

“We’re thrilled to welcome the talented Trello team to Atlassian and look forward to working with them to change the way teams work together. Deep investments in R&D have long been a cornerstone of Atlassian’s business and we will continue that tradition with Trello,” Cannon-Brookes added.

Michael Pryor, Trello's CEO, wrote on his blog to reassure users about the acquisition.

“I spent a lot of time with the founders of Atlassian to make sure they understood what Trello is and why people love it. I'm hopeful that you'll trust us to make sure that Trello stays Trello-y,” he posted.

“In short: you can expect Trello to become even more awesome and more fun than it is today.”

The transaction is expected to close in the third quarter of the 2017 fiscal year.