Atlassian is acquiring The Browser Company

I would've actually expected a buyer like OpenAI or Anthropic, if I'm being perfectly honest. Atlassian is such a strange buyer. $610m in cash is really low in the grand scheme of AI pricing too. If they're only worth $610m, I feel like this says a lot that "AI browsers" aren't actually worth that much. Remember, Instagram was $1b. The Windsurf acquihire was $2.4b and there are surely a lot more people in business that use browsers than write code.

Was Atlassian the highest bidder, or was Atlassian the only bidder?

Considering they never made revenue, there must be more than one bidder - otherwise the price could have been much lower. I remember them raising at $500 MM at the last round

It looks really overpriced to me. Dia is a rough MVP. Arc is really a very niche browser with little adoption. I dont think technology worth this money, and Arc the user base is low compared to major browsers, probably around 1-5 million users with no growth (most likely they hit the plateau even before they decide to kill the Arc in favor of Dia).

Agreed, OpenAI and Anthropic want to get as close to the user as possible. Browser is used more often than a specific website or standalone desktop app and much less work than an entire OS. Raycast also seems well positioned but perhaps more niche.

Perhaps Atlassian was sitting on cash and needed to make some bets. If you can build a big enough user base for a browser it can earn handsomely from AdWords type referral fees. Look at what Google pays Apple to be default on Safari and how much referral spend Chrome recouped for Google etc. Maybe Atlassian will try and promote Dia to its customer base and look to launch more AI type commercial product discovery experiences like Perplexity Shopping.

"Perhaps Atlassian was sitting on cash and needed to make some bets

Perhaps investors should put on a stupidity discount and discount the value of cash when valuing the value of equity!

This is the first I’m hearing of either of these products, or this company. If you’d asked me what a program named Dia was ten minutes ago, I’d have confidently replied that it’s an open source gui diagramming tool.

Given Atlassian's terrible product quality, I give it two years until anything they buy becomes borderline unusable frustration.

Same, and I don't not really wanna try:

"A new AI browser from the makers of Arc: Chat with your tabs"

say what??? )))

Dia is the Irish word for "God". Probably not what The Browser Company were going for, but I can't unthink that when I see it.

Would love hear what, specifically, you find terrible about the quality of their products!