Atlassian makes its first startup acquisition since the Australian tech giant’s $6 billion IPO

Atlassian has bought a small Y Combinator-incubated startup, marking its first acquisition since the Australian startup success story’s $6 billion IPO late last year.

Announced in a blog post by co-founder and CEO Scott Farquhar, Atlassian has acquired Denver-based startup StatusPage for an undisclosed amount of money.

Founded three years ago, StatusPage is a platform allowing online businesses to create a custom page to update customers and internal staff about the status of their online services.

A perfect fit

According to Farquhar, it is the “single source of truth for the status of cloud services”, and is a natural fit with Atlassian’s services.

“Internal status pages are just as important as customer facing ones,” Farquhar writes.

“As companies build and depend on their internal services, internal status pages allow IT and operations departments to efficiently communicate status across the country.

“That’s why StatusPage and Atlassian are a perfect fit. StatusPage furthers Atlassian’s mission to help teams everywhere communicate and collaborate better.”

The Atlassian co-founders have continually argued that every company now is a software company, and that all of these businesses will need a way to keep their users informed when something goes wrong.

“Providing status and regularly communicating with your customers – especially during incidents – has become a critical part of the software delivery process,” Farquhar says.

“We believe a service without status is incomplete. Imagine a mobile phone that doesn’t display its cell signal. When a call drops, or a web page doesn’t load, you have no way of knowing why.”

Joining the Atlassian family

The purchase marks Atlassian’s first acquisition since it went public in the US in December last year, raising more than $605 million through an IPO that valued the Sydney-founded company at more than $6 billion.

The business communication platform has made a series of other acquisitions previously, including Hall most recently last year, BitBucket in 2010 and flagship offering HipChat in 2012.

Atlassian’s third quarter financial results pointed to an increased focus on R&D and product development, signalling an intent to make further acquisitions like this one.

StatusPage co-founder Danny Olinksy says he is “super excited” to be joining Atlassian’s family.

“Whether you know it or not, chances are you’ve used a product built by an Atlassian customer,” Olinsky writes in a blog post.

“They were an early StatusPage customer and have always been a strong StatusPage advocate. They understand that building software isn’t just about shipping features but also about providing a reliable service and being transparent with users when things don’t go as planned.

“In a world of unicorns, amazing burn rates and grow-at-all-costs cultures, there isn’t a better company we could have chosen to join.”

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