Atlassian exec details the $610M Browser Company acquisition

Atlassian’s $610 million purchase of The Browser Company, which built the Arc and AI-driven Dia browsers, surprised many when it was announced last week.

The browsers have polarized both fans and developers, while winning plaudits for their pleasing aesthetics and fresh approach to browser design. (Dia will be integrated into Atlassian’s collaboration and enterprise products.)

Atlassian sees the purchase as worthwhile, especially given the hype around nascent AI browsers and how people will work in the future. The rise of generative AI tools in recent years has sparked renewed interest in the normally staid world of browsers. (Perplexity, which makes the Comet AI browser, recently offered $34.5 billion to buy Google’s Chrome browser. And OpenAI is planning an AI browser of its own.)

In the wake of The Browser Company acquisition, Computerworld spoke with Sanchan Saxena, Atlassian’s head of product, to get a sense of the company’s thinking and strategy going. forward

This is a pretty interesting purchase. But why? “If you look at enterprise employees, 85% of their work happens in the browser. AI is going to reinvent the browser and work layer. Should Atlassian play in that? Yes, we want to play offense.

“We want to solve the problems of knowledge workers with the best browser they can have.

We’re not going after consumer browsers. Our focus is knowledge workers — making their lives better, easier, and faster.”

I’ve used Arc, it has its critics. It worked well on Mac but didn’t play well with Windows. Did you test the company’s product before purchase? “Arc had groundswell adoption at Atlassian. Thousands of employees were using it. So yes, we evaluated the products, possibilities and limitations.

“The original thesis of The Browser Company and Arc was a consumer browser. They’ve built incredible capabilities with design aesthetics far superior to many consumer browsers…. We’re going to build Dia [AI browser] to be enterprise-focused with security and compliance features, while leveraging their design aesthetics for a superior experience for knowledge workers.”

For $610 million you could take the Chromium open-source interface and build your own browser. So why buy them? It seems Google Chrome is valued at $35 billion. “Atlassian has two decades of experience building enterprise software. We know how teams work, we sell teamwork software. The Browser Company has deep knowledge in the browser ecosystem and has proven multiple times they can execute seamless user experience -—consumer-grade user experience.

“The joining of forces makes it super powerful in ways that individually wouldn’t be as powerful.”

How did you come to a $610 million valuation? It seems like a discount to the $35 billion valuation of Google Chrome? “Every five to 10 years, there’s a technological shift. First it was mobile, then SaaS apps moved to the cloud, and now we have AI.

“Our bet is that the browser will be reimagined in the world of AI. It is the ultimate super app. Atlassian wants to play offense on that. We want to be a leader. We are excited to bring Dia and The Browser Company in house to help us achieve that vision.”

Will there be a consumer version of Dia at all? Will it still be available to download? What’s the release schedule? “Arc will continue to exist. Dia will be the future product we’ll bet on to improve, but for knowledge workers, that’s the priority. For a pure consumer browser — meaning, my mom trying to browse — we’re not going to build that product for her.

Will Dia be a paid or free browser for knowledge workers? “We haven’t decided or announced anything on pricing yet. Dia is in beta format and will go GA very soon.

“It’ll be available to users at different pricing. We don’t have further plans to share on how we’re going to monetize or price this.”

This seems like a user-interface play. How does it change the UI for current Atlassian products? “Our vision is that Dia is the best browser for knowledge workers irrespective of whether they use Atlassian products. If you use Figma and Canva, the browser that works deeply well is Dia.

“If you use Jira, Confluence, Loom, and other Atlassian products, just like Apple’s ecosystem, those parts work better together because they share common infrastructure and AI patterns. The goal is to build the best browser for knowledge workers.”

How will it integrate within, as an example, Jira or Confluence, and how does a user’s workflow change? Some workers might resist changing to a new browser. “We’re planning to bring loved features of Arc into Dia.

“Knowledge worker workflow is not passive. Each tab is an action — respond to an email, get to a meeting, respond to a Slack message, work on a doc. In Dia and Arc, you do two things. One, organize tabs into work. You can create folders and pin any B2B SaaS app. You can pin Google Calendar, Gmail, Slack to optimize your workflow.

“With pinned apps you can get to them quickly. You can hover over calendar, see your meetings, and send a Slack message right there.

“The second example is how tabs share context and memory as you traverse through them. Today in Dia, there’s a chat interface. Let’s say you have four Jira tabs and four Confluence tabs open because you’re working on a project.

“Dia Chat allows you to operate across all those tabs from one shared interface. It carries context from one tab to the next, so when you go to the next tab, that context is carried with you. You don’t have to copy/paste.

“It knows you’re working across those projects and builds your memory. As you create further tabs, that memory travels with you. It remembers the project name, actions you took, and can summarize those things or send out a status report.”