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Published on
September 4, 2025
5 min read
Atlassian Acquires The Browser Company to Push into AI-First Browsers
Software firm Atlassian has moved to acquire New York-based startup The Browser Company for $610 million in cash. Atlassian’s move to acquire The Browser Company places the software firm in the AI-driven browser market. The Browser Company provides web browsers with AI features. According to CNBC, the two companies plan to finalize the deal in Atlassian’s second-quarter, which runs from October to December.
Competing with Major Tech Companies
Founded in 2019, The Browser Company has competed with incumbents such as Google (Chrome) and Apple (Safari). In 2022, the New York startup launched Arc, a customizable browser that features a built-in whiteboard and capabilities for sharing groups of tabs.
In June 2025, the company unveiled a simpler browser option called Dia. This browser allows users to chat with an AI assistant about different tabs at once. Atlassian says popular browsers have major shortcomings that affect people who do most of their work online.
“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. It’s not built to work, it’s not built to act, it’s not built to do,” Atlassian Co-founder and CEO, Mike Cannon-Brookes said.
Atlassian AI browser acquisition is happening at a time when the uptake of the Arc browser has been minimal despite its useful tab organization and archiving capabilities, The Browser Company says only a small percentage of users adopted its special features.
“Our metrics were more like a highly specialized professional tool (like a video editor) than a mass-market consumer product, which we aspired to be closer to,” The Browser Company’s Co-founder and CEO, Josh Miller said.
The tech startup stopped developing new features for the Arc browser, a move that raised questions on possibilities of open-sourcing the browser. Atlassian’s 2025 acquisition strategy focuses more on building strategic partnerships that facilitate product integration.
The Race to AI-Powered Browsers
Increasingly, startups are racing to embed agentic AI features in browsers, making them workspaces that can summarize pages and perform actions for users. In December 2024, AI search startup Perplexity approached The Browser Company about a possible buyout. OpenAI had also approached the AI-browser startup.
Perplexity launched an AI-powered browser called Comet in July 2025. In August 2025, the AI startup offered $34 billion to buy the Chrome browser from Google.The offer was far above Perplexity’s valuation, which was last valued at $14billion. It remains unclear whether Atlassian had considered buying the Chrome browser from Google.
“I’m not even sure if there is a bidding competition for Chrome. I didn’t see Google putting up an auction just yet. Look, I think we focus on actually getting acquisitions done and actually making those products a part of a coherent whole and delivering value for our customers. I’m not sure that stunt PR acquisition offers are really our thing, but we’ll leave that for them to do,” Cannon-Brookes said.
The U.S Justice Department had proposed a Chrome sell-off after a federal judge ruled that Google was an illegal monopoly. On September 2, 2025, a court verdict favored Google after U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta rejected calls for a forced Google Chrome divestiture.
Leveraging Dia’s Capabilities
As Atlassian develops AI browsers for enterprise teams, it plans to make Dia a premium platform for work. The browser is designed to bring together different tasks and tools from the web and contextualize enterprise environments. The browser will also be pivotal for customers who use Atlassian enterprise tools like the Jira project management software. Atlassian
“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,” Cannon-Brookes said.
In 2024, the valuation of The Browser Company stood at $550 million. The AI browser startup has been backed by Salesforce Ventures, Atlassian Ventures, LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, and Figma co-founder Dylan Field.
