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Atlassian makes software that helps teams plan, track, and share their work.
Atlassian sells software that helps people work together, especially in tech companies. Its two most famous products are Jira, which teams use to plan and track projects and software bugs, and Confluence, which is like a shared notebook where teams write down plans and documentation. Later it added Trello, a simple visual board for organizing tasks, and a help-desk tool called Jira Service Management. Most customers pay a monthly or yearly subscription per user, so the more people a company adds, the more Atlassian earns. Think of it as the plumbing behind how a team stays organized — not flashy, but hard to rip out once everyone relies on it.
There are really two ways it makes money. First, self-serve cloud plans, where small teams sign up and pay by credit card with almost no salespeople involved. Second, big enterprise deals, where large companies buy bundled plans and pay more. The cloud business is now the vast majority of revenue and is growing fast, while the older model of installing software on a company's own servers is shrinking and being phased out. Atlassian reports revenue in the billions per year, growing around 20 percent, and it is often profitable on a free-cash-flow basis. That cash gets mostly reinvested — into new products, and into acquisitions like Trello, Loom for video messages, and Rovo, its newer AI assistant that helps teams search and summarize work.
Atlassian was started in 2002 in Australia by two friends, Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar, who famously bootstrapped it without much outside money. It listed on NASDAQ in 2015 and is now headquartered in Sydney, though it sells worldwide, with the United States as its biggest market. One thing to watch: it has historically paid no dividend and instead buys back shares and funds growth, and regulators increasingly scrutinize big software makers over data and AI, which keeps pressure on how these tools handle customer information.
Saved answer · last researched 16 Oct 2026