The office wars heat up as one of Slack's main competitors buys Trello
Work productivity software just got a little more integrated.
Atlassian, the workplace software company behind JIRA, HipChat and Confluence, announced Monday it has acquired Trello, adding to its portfolio of tools for team collaboration and project management.
Atlassian is acquiring Trello for $425 million, with $360 million in cash and the rest in shares. Trello is expected to remain as a standalone service. Trello had previously raised around $10.4 million in venture capital, according to Crunchbase.
"We're giving teams more choice in the tools they use to support the way they want to work. Trello will become an important part of the Atlassian portfolio, offering a fun, new way for teams to organize the often messy range of information that feeds into great teamwork," Jay Simons, president of Atlassian, wrote in an email to Mashable.
Founded in 2011, Trello has grown more than 19 million registered users across more than 100 countries. Clients include the United Nations, Red Cross, Google and Mashable.
Trello allows users to organize information into virtual boards. Each project or task can be made into a virtual card, which users can label with who's working on it and what the status is. Cards can be moved from list to list or board to board as steps are taken.
Simons told Mashable that the team at Atlassian had been "admirers for awhile" of Trello. Given Trello's significant growth over the last 12 months, "they've clearly built a breakout product that users both love and find incredible value from using," Simons wrote.
It isn't just about in-office work. More than 50 percent of Trello's users work in non-technical roles. The product is used by Fortune 100 companies and for personal means.
Under Atlassian, the company has gained yet another tool as it competes with Slack, Microsoft and Google for workers' attention. While Slack is bolstered by more than $500 million in venture capital funding, Atlassian is growing through acquisition and by enhancing its suite.
Atlassian, which is publicly-traded and 14 years old, focuses in on providing a broad array of tools. Trello fits between its other offerings, Simons said. Confluence provides more unstructured content sharing while JIRA offers very structured workflow and product management.
"Building the kind of momentum, user growth and passionate customer base Trello has achieved is very difficult and rare," Simons wrote. "It takes a very special product and a very special team."
Kerry Flynn is a business reporter for Mashable covering the tech industry. She previously reported on social media companies, mobile apps and startups for International Business Times. She has also written for The Huffington Post, Forbes and Money magazine. Kerry studied environmental science and economics at Harvard College, where she led The Harvard Crimson's metro news and design teams and played mellophone in the Band. When not listening to startup pitches, she runs half-marathons, plays with puppies and pretends to like craft beer.
