Trello Gets Acquired By Atlassian For $425M

Organizing, assigning, and tracking tasks for a team is an extensively time consuming task. If your work deals with managing projects or meeting deadlines or you simply want to sort out the things you need to do on an everyday basis, you probably would have heard of Trello at some point. A result of TechCrunch Disrupt Battlefield in 2011, Trello was launched as a service in 2014 from company Fog Creek Software as a stand-alone company.

With Trello, you are able to show all of the projects from the entire team in a single place. From there, you can assign project by putting them in the assigned person’s or team’s list. Completed a task? Simply drag the task to the completed list. You can also perform tasks such as commenting or adding links to each task, or “card”. For added functionality, you can also upload files from Dropbox or Google Drive and Trello also works across multiple devices so that you are up to date on what’s important.

If you have used Trello, then you know what a life saver it truly is. Some go so far as to call it the best project management service available right now.

Well, the best may just be on the verge of getting better

Atlassian recently announced that they had acquired Trello for $425 million. For those not in the know, Atlassian is an enterprise software company that develops products for software developers, project managers, and content management. Of the entire figure, $360 million is cash with the remainder of it being out as restricted shares and options.

Currently, this would be Atlassian’s 18th acquisition to date and by far, the largest as well. Just to clarify things, Trello as a service and a brand will still be very much alive. It will just be under the umbrella of Atlassian so if you’re already a Trello user, you shouldn’t see an immediate change.

With the acquisition of Trello, Atlassian essentially gets one of the fastest growing project management services under their wing. That’s a grand total of an estimated 19 million users and a little under 100 employees all who are now a part of Atlassian.

Atlassian already has its own project management service called JIRA which also features a Trello-like Kanban board. However, that’s simply a small part of what JIRA does. JIRA goes deeper, providing a complete issue-tracking service, reports, and an on-site server version as well.

We are also bound to see a host of Trello’s “power-ups” appear on Atlassian’s Marketplace.

Atlassian’s end goal is to 100 million monthly active users. To achieve this goal, Atlassian will branch out into other verticals to get there. In the press release launched by the company, they specifically mention Trello’s popularity with business teams in finance, HR, legal, marketing and sales. They also noted that 50% of Trello users work in non-technical functions.

For the immediate future, we are still to get details about Atlassian’s plans and how the company plans to integrate Trello’s services then. I guess we’ll just have to wait and see.

Have you used Trello? Love it? Hate it? Let us know in the comment section below.