Atlassian to acquire The Browser Company for $610M to bring AI-powered browsing into the enterprise

Atlassian is making a $610 million bet on the future of browsing. The enterprise software giant announced it has agreed to acquire The Browser Company, the New York-based startup behind Arc and Dia, two browsers built with artificial intelligence at their core. The all-cash deal is expected to close in Atlassian’s fiscal second quarter, which wraps in December.

The acquisition news comes two years after Atlassian acquired communications and video platform Loom, in a deal valued at nearly $1 billion.

In a post on X, The Browser Company confirmed the acquisition, saying, “Today, The Browser Company of New York is entering into an agreement to be acquired by Atlassian for $610M in an all-cash transaction. We will operate independently, with Dia as our focus. Our objective is to bring Dia to the masses.”

Founded in 2019, The Browser Company set out to challenge giants like Google and Apple by rethinking what a browser could be. Arc, released in 2022, came with a built-in whiteboard and tools to organize and share tabs, while Dia—launched in beta this summer—let users chat with an AI assistant about the contents of multiple tabs at once.

Atlassian co-founder and CEO Mike Cannon-Brookes said the browser has been overlooked as a true productivity hub. “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,” he said in an interview. “It’s not built to work, it’s not built to act, it’s not built to do.” He described Arc’s features as making it easier to manage work, with auto-archiving and smarter tab organization.

Despite Arc’s loyal fan base, adoption stalled. Josh Miller, The Browser Company’s co-founder and CEO, admitted the numbers skewed more toward niche professional usage than mass-market success. In a newsletter, he compared it to a “highly specialized professional tool (like a video editor)” rather than a product embraced by everyday users. That slowdown led the company to halt new feature development for Arc and sparked questions about whether the browser would eventually be open-sourced.

The acquisition brings The Browser Company’s AI-first vision into Atlassian’s orbit, giving it a chance to weave browsing into its suite of enterprise tools such as Jira. Cannon-Brookes said the real value lies in blending the strengths of Arc and Dia with Atlassian’s expertise in enterprise collaboration. “It’s really about taking Arc’s SaaS application experience and power user features, and Dia’s AI and elegance and speed and sort of svelte nature, and Atlassian’s enterprise know-how, and working out how to put all that together into Dia, or into the AI part of the browser,” he said.

The Browser Company wasn’t short on suitors. Reports surfaced that AI search startup Perplexity, which recently made a $34.5 billion play for Google Chrome, had explored buying the company late last year. OpenAI was also said to be in talks. The Browser Company was last valued at $550 million, with backing from Atlassian Ventures, Salesforce Ventures, Figma co-founder Dylan Field, and LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman.

For Atlassian, the deal is about more than bolting a new product onto its lineup. It’s a signal that the company sees the browser itself as a battleground for productivity software—one that has long been dominated by Chrome, Safari, and a handful of others. Whether Arc and Dia can finally break through under Atlassian’s roof remains to be seen, but this is the boldest attempt yet to reimagine the browser as more than just a place to surf the web.