Highlights:

  • The acquisition will enhance Atlassian’s current lineup of productivity software tailored for developers and engineers.
  • The company also intends to use Loom’s advancements in AI and video tech to facilitate seamless transitions between video, video transcripts, and documents.

Atlassian Corp., a provider of collaboration and productivity development software, announced recently that it will acquire Loom Inc., a provider of a work-focused video collaboration platform, for USD 975 million, its largest acquisition to date.

Loom, a company founded in 2016, produces software that allows users to record videos of their computer displays and share them with colleagues in order to provide context for their work and facilitate teamwork. Through direct visual signals about user experience, code reviews, sharing feedback, understanding what is occurring with video editing, troubleshooting, and conducting meetings, the software and tools enable colleagues to complete their work.

Large corporations like Netflix, HubSpot, Juniper Networks, and Atlassian are among the ones Loom lists as clients.

Co-founder and Co-Chief Executive of Atlassian, Mike Cannon-Brookes, said, “Async video is the next evolution of team collaboration, and teaming up with Loom helps distributed teams communicate in deeply human ways.”

The “deep expertise on how teams work” and “go-to place for over 260,000 customers” at Atlassian, according to the company, are the reasons it sought out and acquired Loom. It would strengthen the business’s current line-up of productivity software for programmers and engineers, including Jira, a project issue and ticket management system where video could significantly improve understanding and problem-solving.

The business added that it would incorporate Loom’s advances in video and artificial intelligence to facilitate switching between video, video transcripts, and documents. When creating titles, summaries, chapters, and other tasks from video work, Loom has invested in AI capabilities that relieve users of that burden. Additionally, the AI can create transcripts and offer simple editing capabilities.

Atlassian stated that this will bring the power of its platform to Loom customers by enabling them to integrate video directly into ticketing workflows such as Jira and systems such as Confluence, a team knowledge base that can store and organize any type of document in a centralized and searchable location.

Following its USD 130 million Series C round in May 2021, led by Andreessen Horowitz, Loom had raised a total of USD 203.6 million in funding. The same round granted the company the coveted status of “unicorn,” valuing it at USD 1.53 billion for the first time, despite laying off 14% of its staff, or 34 employees, in June, citing “economic uncertainty.”

The transaction is expected to close in the third quarter of fiscal year 2024, according to Atlassian, and the total consideration will consist of approximately USD 880 million in cash and the remainder in company equity.