The story
Founded by Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar in 2002, in Sydney.1
In 2001, Mike Cannon-Brookes sent an email to his University of New South Wales classmates asking if any of them were interested in helping him launch a tech startup after graduation. Scott Farquhar was the only one who replied, and together they founded Atlassian in 2002. They bootstrapped the company for several years, financing the startup with a $10,000 credit card debt. The name was derived from the Greek mythological figure Atlas, inspired by his bronze statue in New York's Rockefeller Center.
Initially, Cannon-Brookes and Farquhar were engaged in supporting other customer service teams, which required them to be available for calls at all hours. They were also unhappy with the bug-tracking software they were using at the time. To solve these issues, they developed Atlassian's flagship product, Jira, a project and issue tracking tool, and shifted their focus to selling this software. Then, in 2004, Atlassian launched its team collaboration platform named Confluence.
In July 2010, Atlassian raised $60 million in secondaries venture capital from Accel Partners. By June of the next year it announced that revenue had increased 35% in the previous year to $102 million.
In July 2012, Doug Burgum became chairman of its board of directors.
In 2013, Atlassian announced a Jira service desk product with full service-level agreement support.
A 2014 restructuring saw the parent company become Atlassian Corporation PLC of the UK, whose address was registered in London, though the de facto headquarters remained in Sydney.
In November 2015, Atlassian announced sales of $320 million, and Shona Brown was added to its board. On 10 December 2015, Atlassian made its initial public offering (IPO) on the NASDAQ stock exchange, under the symbol TEAM, putting the market capitalisation of Atlassian at $4.37 billion. The IPO made its founders Farquhar and Cannon-Brookes Australia's first tech startup billionaires and household names in their native country, despite Atlassian being called a "very boring software company" in The New York Times for its focus on development and management software.
In March 2019, Atlassian's value was US$26.6 billion. Cannon-Brookes and Farquhar own approximately 30% each. In October 2020, Atlassian announced the end of support for its "Server" products with sales ending in February 2021 and support ending in February 2024 to focus on "Cloud" and "Data Centre" editions.
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In October 2021, Atlassian received approval to construct its new headquarters in Sydney, which will anchor the Tech Central precinct. Their building is planned to be the world's tallest hybrid timber structure and will embody leading sustainability technologies and principles.
In March 2023, the firm announced layoffs of 500 employees, or 5% of its workforce. In October 2023, Microsoft identified a severe zero-day vulnerability that can be exploited remotely and anonymously in Atlassian's Confluence product. It also accused Chinese state-backed group known as Storm-0062, DarkShadow, or Oro0lxy, of breaking into Atlassian customers' systems several weeks earlier. Atlassian asked its customers to look for signs of a breach, as it could not itself confirm whether its systems were affected. The flaw has since been fixed via an update that the customers would need to apply.
At the end of August 2024, Farquhar stepped down as co-CEO, leaving Cannon-Brookes as the sole CEO of the company. Farquhar remains on the board and as a special adviser.
In March 2026, Atlassian announced that it would lay off around 10% of its workforce to pivot into artificial intelligence and enterprise sales.
2019 data leak
In July 2019, cybersecurity researcher Sam Jadali exposed a catastrophic data leak known as DataSpii involving clickstream data provider DDMR and marketing intelligence company Nacho Analytics (NA). Branding itself as the "God mode for the internet", NA granted its free and paid members the ability to access real-time Jira and Confluence data from Atlassian's cloud and on-premises products, impacting thousands of Atlassian customers including Reddit, FireEye, NBC Digital, BuzzFeed, AlienVault, Cardinal Health, T-Mobile, and Under Armour.
Ars Technica's coverage of Jadali's findings highlighted DataSpii's ability to disseminate sensitive Atlassian Jira data, including Blue Origin staff's competitor discussions and technical issues with sensors, equipment and manifolds.
DataSpii circumvented the most effective security measures, enabling the unauthorised dissemination of Jira data from the internal corporate networks of leading cybersecurity firms. This resulted in the real-time leakage of Jira tickets containing the cybersecurity issues of entities such as the Pentagon, Bank of America, AT&T and others. Jadali's investigation revealed that DDMR facilitated rapid dissemination of the data to additional third parties, often within minutes of acquisition, endangering the privacy of the sensitive data collected.
From Wikipedia’s article on Atlassian, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.8