first, what does this price mean for the browser company? their last round valued them at $550m, so this is basically giving the previous investors their money back. in other words, bare minimum price they could sell for without somebody taking a loss. pretty bad for them: the market sees no future value, josh’s “vision” for browsers couldn’t get better than buzzwords.
second, what does this price mean for atlassian? they have $3b cash, so this is 20% of their piggy bank. and with $1.2b q3 profit, they’ll make it all back before you even start carving a pumpkin this year.
third, what does this sale mean for the browser company? josh miller wants to keep making videos about making web browsers, and if he’s gonna get his hearts of darkness moment, he’ll take a few mil from the aussies to stay with it.
fourth, and most important, what does this sale mean for atlassian? in short: it gets them in the ai race, for relatively little (feature flags for $1b? b-tier coding ide for $2.4b? shitty data tagging for $14b???), in one of the few product areas that have any viability so far.
what are the actual product areas that have come out of ai?
vibe coding: lovable, replit, etc. ask for a todo app, get a todo app. can’t think of anything else to do, forget you subscribed, go on linkedin and tell people it was awesome
coding assistant: cursor, claude code, codex, etc. write some code, have an intern-level chatbot write some more code, realize you hate doing code review, ship shitty unreviewed intern code that never improves, get mad, stop using it, get fired from coinbase
ai browser: comet, dia (this is the browser company), etc. browse the web and have it…click buttons for you, but slower? honestly idk what these do really
chatbot: grok, chatgpt, etc. go watch bo burnham’s “welcome to the internet” and it’s all those things except instead of with other people it’s with ai
other than these, it’s “i can’t wait to see what people do with it” while vcs trip over each other to throw cash at pre-idea prepubescents who tweeted a banger one time.
so, if you’re atlassian and you want to be in the game, what do you do? do a grok and spend billions on a colossus to have a chatbot? or rescue an ai browser company that lost their momentum and has no plans to make money, for much much less? you’re in one of the four pillars for cheap now, and if/when a new product area springs up for ai, there’s a product-forward team in prime position to jump on it.
this way, everyone at browser company walks away in the black, while atlassian spends less than any other player to get back in the hand. good deal for them, imo.