Atlassian’s Code Barrel Deal Makes 2019 One Of Its Most Acquisitive Years On Record

On Thursday, collaboration company Atlassian announced its acquisition of Code Barrel, which makes automation tooling for Atlassian’s flagship team ticket tracking product, Jira. Both companies are headquartered in Sydney, Australia.

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The price Atlassian paid for Code Barrel was not disclosed. Code Barrel does not have any known funding listed in Crunchbase. Code Barrel has nine listed employees on its LinkedIn profile.

Code Barrel was co-founded by Andreas Knecht and Nick Menere were early members of the Jira team at Atlassian, and many of the company’s team members were former Atlassian employees.

According to an acquisition announcement published to Code Barrel’s blog, Knecht wrote that “My co-founder Nick and I spent a collective 20 years at Atlassian and it became a massive part of our lives. Naturally, when we left to set up our own company, building apps for the Atlassian Marketplace, we lived by the same values.” The pair started the company in 2016 and now serves 6,000 customers and executes “over 40 million automation rules each month in the cloud,” according to their announcement.

The company said that the acquisition will allow its team to invest more in R&D to continue improving its Automation for Jira system. TechCrunch reports that Code Barrel will continue to offer its automation tooling at the same price of $5 per user per month for teams up to 10 people, and $2.50 per user per month for teams between 11 and 100. Code Barrel will continue offering special enterprise packages for larger teams.

Code Barrel is Atlassian’s third known acquisition in 2019, according to Crunchbase data, making this year the most acquisitive in Atlassian’s roughly 17-year history. Crunchbase has listings for 13 acquisitions, but Atlassian said it has acquired over 20 companies.

Other acquisitions from 2019 include Good Software, another Sydney, Australia-based Atlassian Marketplace vendor which develops an analytics package for Atlassian’s Confluence collaboration platform. The terms of that acquisition were not disclosed. In March, Atlassian acquired Austin, TX-based AgileCraft for $166 million in cash and restricted stock, according to the company’s announcement and coverage right here on Crunchbase News.

It’s not the largest M&A deal Atlassian has ever engaged in, though. That distinction goes to its buyout of Kanban-inspired task tracker Trello, which Atlassian acquired for $425 million back in January 2017.

Atlassian appears to be making acquisitions a bigger part of its corporate strategy. The company released a standardized version of its M&A term sheet in June. The company asserts that transparency around its M&A deal-making will smooth out the process for both itself and stakeholders at prospective acquisition targets.

Atlassian said it has completed over $1 billion in M&A transactions to date.

Illustration: Li-Anne Dias