Atlassian just closed a $610 million cash deal to acquire The Browser Company, maker of the Arc browser, after beating out OpenAI and Perplexity in what's shaping up as the year's most surprising enterprise acquisition. The deal signals how seriously productivity software giants are taking the AI-powered browser battleground.
Atlassian just pulled off one of the year's most unexpected enterprise acquisitions, snatching The Browser Company from under the noses of AI heavyweights OpenAI and Perplexity with a $610 million all-cash offer. The deal, announced today, values the startup at an 11% premium to its $550 million valuation from last year and marks Atlassian's biggest bet yet on AI-powered productivity tools.
The Browser Company, founded in 2019, has been quietly building what many consider the most innovative browser since Chrome's debut. Its flagship Arc browser launched in 2022 with features that sound mundane but feel revolutionary: customizable workspaces, automatic tab archiving, and built-in collaboration tools. More recently, the company released Dia, a beta browser that lets users chat with an AI assistant about multiple tabs simultaneously.
"Whatever it is that you're actually doing in your browser is not particularly well served by a browser that was built in the name to browse," Atlassian CEO Mike Cannon-Brookes told CNBC. "It's not built to work, it's not built to act, it's not built to do." The comments reveal how Atlassian sees browsers as the next frontier for workplace productivity, especially as employees spend most of their day in web applications like Jira and Confluence.
But The Browser Company wasn't an easy catch. According to a report from The Information, both Perplexity and OpenAI held acquisition talks with the startup in December. Perplexity, which recently made headlines with a $34.5 billion bid for Google's Chrome browser, has been aggressively building its own AI-powered browsing experience called Comet.
The timing of this deal couldn't be more strategic. The browser market, long dominated by Google's Chrome and Apple's Safari, is experiencing its biggest shake-up since the early 2000s. The U.S. Justice Department's antitrust case against has put Chrome's future in question, while AI-powered alternatives are gaining traction among power users frustrated with traditional browsing experiences.
