Atlassian launches a $50M venture fund to invest in its ecosystem

NelsonG · September 16, 2020

Atlassian today announced the launch of Atlassian Ventures, a new $50 million fund that will invest into startups — and even more established companies — that are building products in the overall Atlassian ecosystem.

“As more and more customers transition to our cloud products, we are committed to supporting their journey by fostering a robust ecosystem of cloud-based apps that enhance their experience and satisfy all use cases,” Chris Hecht, Atlassian’s Head of Corportate Development, writes in today’s announcement. “We are incredibly proud of the 4,200+ apps already available in our Marketplace and the integrations we already offer with popular tools like Slack, Zendesk, and GitHub . But this is no time to rest on our laurels. Atlassian Ventures will facilitate our continued investment in the best-of-breed tools and integrations our customers need to fuel the next wave of innovation and manage their work, both now and into the future.”

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The fund is taking a three-pronged approach. It will invest in early-stage startups that build products for the company’s cloud products. These include Jira, Confluence, Bitbucket and Trello .

But it will also invest in established companies that are working to scale their businesses. Given the size of the fund, it’s maybe no surprise that the firm will partner with other VCs to make these investments. Hecht cites Atlassian’s existing investments in Zoom, Slack, InVision, process.st and Split.io as examples for this.

In addition to these two groups, the fund will also invest into members of the Atlassian Partner Program that are “looking to augment their cloud services and/or create new products that support the future of work.”

In this context, it’s worth noting that Atlassian has recently acquired a few companies in its ecosystem, too, including Code Barrel (the company behind Automation for Jira), Mindville and Halp.