The president of $26.6 billion Atlassian explains the 'gnarly problem' that prompted its $166 million acquisition of AgileCraft

Business Insider Australia

Atlassian president Jay Simons at an Atlassian user conference

• Atlassian will acquire the Texas-based startup AgileCraft for $166 million, the company announced Monday.
• AgileCraft helps companies with creating a "master plan" for building, managing, and delivering projects.
• Atlassian president Jay Simons explains why the company chose to acquire AgileCraft, which follows Atlassian's acquisitions of Opsgenie last October and Trello in 2017.

Atlassian announced Monday that it will acquire Texas-based startup AgileCraft for $166 million.

AgileCraft, which was founded in 2013, helps companies with building and managing their projects, essentially helping them create a "master plan." According to PitchBook, AgileCraft raised $10 million after raising its Series B round in 2015.

This deal, which is comprised of approximately $154 million in cash and the remainder in Atlassian restricted shares, is expected to close in early April.

"Customers that we've spoken to are really happy about the capability for businesses for agile planning at scale," Atlassian president Jay Simons told Business Insider. "We've got lots of customers who don't have this capability. My hope is they see the acquisition announcement and join the happy family of customers who are using AgileCraft."

AgileCraft already has integrations with Atlassian's popular tools like Jira and Trello, and both AgileCraft and Atlassian have overlapping customers, so this acquisition made sense, Simons says. AgileCraft will help Atlassian's customers with better planning, using data from other tools like Jira and Trello.

Read more: $25 billion Atlassian is releasing a new tool to help developers release code faster as it takes on GitHub

AgileCraft can also help companies better understand what they need to do and the roadblocks they face when delivering a project. If a certain part of a software project is lagging behind other teams, or its code is yielding more bugs, for example, AgileCraft can identify it.

"For really large enterprises, this is a really gnarly problem," Simons said. "They need the ability to make these kinds of decisions. That's really what this is about."

Atlassian acquired Trello for $425 million in 2017, its largest acquisition to date. Atlassian also acquired Opsgenie in October for $295 million.

"Atlassian's overall strategy is to unleash the potential of every team," Simons said. "Oftentimes our tools get brought in there to solve collaborative development around technology problems."