Atlassian Snaps Up Texas-Based AgileCraft For $166M

Australian software giant Atlassian announced today plans to buy Austin-based AgileCraft for $166 million.

The deal is a mix of cash and stock, though weighted heavily towards currency. According to the acquiring company, $154 million was paid in cash, with the rest “Atlassian restricted shares, subject to continued vesting provisions.”

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At the time of writing, Atlassian is worth over $26.5 billion. Therefore, the deal’s stock component is a rounding error.

AgileCraft’s goal is to help enterprise organizations build and manage a ‘master plan’ of their most strategic projects and workstreams. (We’ve emailed AgileCraft about the transaction, and will update this post when we hear back.)

In a press release issued today, Atlassian outlined the reasons why it’s buying the six-year-old startup, which has raised just over $10 million in venture funding. Here’s what Atlassian had to say:

“We know loads of time is wasted collecting status updates across hundreds of agile teams, getting unstructured snapshots of capacity, and trying to measure value generation. These challenges require a different set of tools – ones that give leaders critical visibility and allow them to adapt in a timely way. We’ve heard from our enterprise customers that these problems are really hard to tackle – and they need our help along the way. That’s why we’re excited to share we’ve entered into an agreement to acquire AgileCraft, a leader in enabling scaled agile transformations.”

Notably, AgileCraft had no publicly-known fundraising since 2015. That’s eons in venture capital circles. Either the company reached profitability or was parsimonious for some time. Regardless, a 15x multiple on invested capital is likely a healthy return for the company and its backers alike.

Some of you may not know that Atlassian has a fairly large presence in Austin, having opened a large office here in 2014. So it’s not entirely shocking that it would buy a local firm. (The firm also has an office in San Francisco, and, of course, lots of folks in Australia.) Although if we want to be 100 percent accurate, AgileCraft is actually based in Georgetown, Texas, which is a small suburb located about 30 miles from the Texas capital.

The deal marks Atlassian’s second acquisition in the past year. In September, it picked up OpsGenie, a Virginia-based incident management platform, for $295 million. Since 2010, Atlassian has acquired 10 companies, according to its Crunchbase profile.

Illustration: Li-Anne Dias