The Team Behind Team Software
In 2002 two friends from the University of New South Wales, Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar, decided they would rather build a company than take conventional graduate jobs. They funded the first version of what became Jira with roughly $10,000 of credit-card debt. More than two decades later, Atlassian's software runs quietly behind the software the rest of us use.
Atlassian makes tools that help teams organize, discuss, and finish shared work. Its two anchors are Jira, for tracking projects, tasks, and issues, and Confluence, a shared workspace for documents and knowledge. Around them sits a wider suite: Trello's visual boards, Bitbucket for code, Jira Service Management for IT and support, Opsgenie for on-call alerting, Loom for async video, and Rovo, the company's AI layer. Individually each solves a specific coordination problem. Together they form a connected system of record for how a company gets things done.
The customers are broad by design. Atlassian tools show up in two-person startups and in a large share of the Fortune 500, used not only by software engineers but by IT, marketing, HR, legal, and operations teams. That spread is the point: the products were built to be adopted by a single team and then to spread sideways through an organization as other groups notice the work happening in them.
Atlassian's mission is to unleash the potential of every team.
The problem it solves
Work inside any organization of scale tends to scatter - across inboxes, chat threads, spreadsheets, and people's heads. Atlassian's premise is that shared work needs a shared surface: a single place where a task's status, history, owner, and context all live and stay visible. Jira turns vague requests into trackable items; Confluence keeps the reasoning and documentation that surrounds them; Jira Service Management gives support and operations a front door for incidents and requests. The value is less any one feature than the reduction of ambiguity about who is doing what, and where the truth lives.
How it is different
Atlassian's most-copied difference is not a product feature but a go-to-market choice. For much of its history the company grew with almost no traditional outbound sales force, relying instead on free trials, low per-user pricing, transparent documentation, and word of mouth. Teams could adopt the tools without a procurement meeting. That low-friction model let Atlassian reach a scale of customers that would be uneconomical to sell to one enterprise contract at a time.
The second difference is the Marketplace. By opening the platform to third-party developers, Atlassian let its customers extend the products themselves, spawning thousands of apps the company never had to build or staff. That ecosystem deepens switching costs and keeps the platform adaptable to niches Atlassian would never reach alone.
Products and services
Jira
Project, issue, and work tracking for software and business teams - the company's flagship.
Confluence
Collaborative workspace for documents, wikis, and shared team knowledge.
Jira Service Management
IT service management and incident response for support and ops teams.
Trello
Visual, board-based collaboration for organizing tasks and projects.
Loom
Async video messaging, now woven across Atlassian tools.
Rovo
AI search, chat, and agents that plan and execute work across apps.
The business model
Atlassian sells subscriptions, priced per user, across cloud and Data Center plans. Revenue also flows from the Marketplace, where the company shares proceeds with third-party developers, and increasingly from larger enterprise and channel-partner deals. The economics have long been unusual for enterprise software: comparatively little spent on direct sales, and heavy reinvestment in research and development. In fiscal 2025 the company reported $5.22 billion in revenue; in the third quarter of fiscal 2026 it reported roughly $1.8 billion, up 32% year over year, with cloud revenue passing $1.13 billion.
Customers using Rovo are growing recurring revenue at roughly two times the rate of customers who don't.
Expertise and the AI turn
Atlassian's deepest expertise is in the mechanics of teamwork at scale - workflows, permissions, integrations, and the migration of large customers from self-hosted servers to the cloud, a transition it has managed more patiently than most vendors. Its current bet is Rovo, an AI layer of search, chat, and agents that work across Jira, Confluence, and connected apps. Rovo Service, a human-supervised agent for employee support and IT workflows, reached general availability, and the company has pursued a multi-model strategy, including a partnership with Google Cloud. Management frames the Teamwork Collection - bundling Jira, Confluence, Loom, and Rovo - as its primary AI buying motion.
Where it fits in the market
Atlassian sits at the center of the work-management and DevOps tooling market, competing on different fronts with Monday.com and Asana on project management, ServiceNow on IT service management, GitLab and GitHub on developer workflows, and Microsoft and Notion on collaboration. Few rivals span as many of those categories at once. That breadth, plus a large installed base and a sprawling app ecosystem, is the company's structural advantage - and the reason its tools remain embedded even among teams that grumble about them.
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Frequently asked
What does Atlassian do?
Atlassian makes software that helps teams plan, track, and collaborate on work. Its best-known products are Jira for project and issue tracking and Confluence for team collaboration, alongside Trello, Bitbucket, Jira Service Management, Loom, and the Rovo AI tools.
Who founded Atlassian and when?
It was founded in 2002 in Sydney, Australia by Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar, who met as students at the University of New South Wales.
Is Atlassian a public company?
Yes. Atlassian went public on the NASDAQ stock exchange in December 2015 under the ticker symbol TEAM.
How does Atlassian make money?
Primarily through subscription software sold on a per-user basis, across cloud and Data Center plans, plus revenue from its app Marketplace and a growing enterprise business. It historically grew with a low-touch, self-serve sales model.
What is Rovo?
Rovo is Atlassian's AI layer - search, chat, and agents that work across Jira, Confluence, and connected apps to help teams find information and automate tasks. Customers using Rovo have been growing recurring revenue faster than those who don't.