Atlassian bats eyelashes at the enterprise with AgileCraft acquisition

166 million reasons to keep tabs on all those agile projects

Atlassian has acquired AgileCraft - the Texas-based outfit intent on inflicting agile practices on enterprises - for $166m.

The deal, which is expected to close in April, consists of $154m in cash and the rest in Atlassian restricted shares.

AgileCraft is all about the Agile Methodology, a development practice that, depending on your point of view, either fosters collaboration between stakeholders and continual improvement... or means devs never actually have to deliver something that works.

Atlassian is a noted purveyor of tools to support the methodology, with its services, including the flagship Jira project and issue-tracking software, finding their way into more than two-thirds of Fortune 500 companies.

Jira is, of course, rather engineering and IT focused. AgileCraft sits atop it (and other platforms) to give execs a better idea of what is actually going on without having to pick through a mountain of status updates from the various tools beloved by engineers.

Scott Farquhar, co-founder of Atlassian, observed: "Many Atlassian customers, including AT&T, Anthem, NCR, TIAA, and Duke Energy trust AgileCraft to scale their teams' agile practices."

Atlassian is no stranger to acquisitions: in 2018 it acquired IT incident monitoring vendor OpsGenie for $295m and Trello in 2017 for $425m. Atlassian also recently joined the $1bn club following a bumper Q2 of fiscal 2019, which logged $299m in revenues.

Atlassian expects its new acquisition to add approximately $1m-$2m to those revenues and reduce the company's IFRS operating margin by around one point.

Founded in 2013, AgileCraft raised $10.1m in a single series A funding round back in 2015. The company has the lofty goal of "enabling 1,000 agile enterprises by 2023". ®