Mike Cannon-Brookes, the CEO of enterprise software giant Atlassian, was one of the first users of the Arc browser. Over the last several years, he has been a prolific bug reporter and feature requester. Now he’ll own the thing: Atlassian is acquiring The Browser Company, the New York-based startup that makes both Arc and the new AI-focused Dia browser. Atlassian is paying $610 million in cash for The Browser Company, and plans to run it as an independent entity.
The conversations that led to the deal started about a year ago, says Josh Miller, The Browser Company’s CEO. Lots of Atlassian employees were using Arc, and “they reached out wondering, how could we get more enterprise-ready?” Miller says. Big companies require data privacy, security, and management features in the software they use, and The Browser Company didn’t offer enough of them. Eventually, as companies everywhere raced to put AI at the center of their businesses, and as The Browser Company made its own bets in AI, Cannon-Brookes suggested maybe the companies were better off together.
The acquisition is mostly about Dia, which launched in June. Dia is a mix of web browser and chatbot, with a built-in way to chat with your tabs but also do things across apps. Open up three spreadsheets in three tabs and Dia can move data between them; log into your Gmail and Dia can tell you what’s next on the calendar. Anything with a URL immediately becomes data available to Dia and its AI models. For a company like Atlassian, which makes a whole suite of work apps — the popular project-tracker Jira, the note-taking app Confluence, plus Trello, Loom, and more — a way to stitch them all together seems obviously compelling.
Miller is clear, even forceful, that Dia is not about to become just a wrapper for Atlassian apps, or shift to thinking primarily about IT managers and enterprise features. Dia is still for individual users. It’s just that now, it’s primarily for individual users at work. Before, Miller says, “we talked a lot about shopping, making reservations, finding showtimes. That is going to go away in terms of our focus.” He says he sees everyone else, from ChatGPT to Claude to Gemini to Replika, competing to be a central new character in your personal life. He’s happy to build a work tool instead.
For The Browser Company, the deal is both a big exit and a slightly surprising one. With companies like Anthropic tripling their valuation out of nowhere and practically any startup with a .ai domain name raking in billions in funding, why get out of the race now? It’s easy to look at this deal as The Browser Company waving the white flag, getting out while the getting’s good and before the bigger players fully take over.
Not surprisingly, Miller doesn’t see it that way. He offers a couple of reasons to do this deal now, starting with the sheer speed at which this market is moving. “I think the winner of the AI browser space is going to be crowned in the next 12 to 24 months,” he says. For Dia to become truly mainstream, The Browser Company needs huge distribution, a sales organization, and scale it simply doesn’t have and probably can’t get quickly enough. “It didn’t feel like something money could buy, in the time horizon we had,” Miller says. He says this is the way to make sure Dia doesn’t get swallowed by the big names.
“I think the winner of the AI browser space is going to be crowned in the next 12 to 24 months”
Selling to a company like Atlassian also gives The Browser Company some much-needed stability in an incredibly frothy market. “It reverts us back to a clear focus,” Miller says. He seems very excited to not have to worry about raising more money. The only goal, he says, is to get more active users for Dia, and trust that Atlassian can figure out how to turn that into more revenue for the company.
As for what this all means for The Browser Company’s browsers, it’s still too early to say for sure. Miller promises no favored-nation features for Atlassian products, nor any Microsoft Edge-style popups begging you to sign up for Jira. Miller says the team is even more committed to being a truly cross-platform product, and that Windows in particular is about to get a lot more attention. He also says there’s an aggressive roadmap for bringing the best of Arc to Dia, after the company’s pivot angered some of its most dedicated users. Arc’s status hasn’t changed, and will still be maintained but not actively developed. (Reading between the lines, though? I wouldn’t count on Arc being around for too long — there’s just no place for it in this new arrangement.)
The Browser Company has been through a lot of changes the last few years, but its biggest idea has both stayed consistent and been largely correct: that the era of siloed apps was coming to an end, and that the browser would be a powerful new way to interact with computers. Almost everyone agrees with this theory, too: Perplexity has a browser, Google is AI-ifying Chrome at a blistering pace, even OpenAI is reportedly close to launching a browser based on ChatGPT. The job in front of Miller now is not to convince the world he’s right, but to make sure he wins. And when you need to win, it really does help to have a sales team.
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