Welcome back to Neural Notes, a weekly column where I look at how AI is affecting Australia. In this edition: Atlassian gets in on the AI browser game, and none of us should be surprised.
Australian unicorn Atlassian has acquired The Browser Company for $935 million (US$610 million). The New York-based startup, which raised US$50 million in 2024, is behind popular AI-powered browsers Arc and Dia.
This follows other major Atlassian acquisitions, including $577.8 million for Trello in 2017 and $1.5 billion for Loom in 2023.
Arc and Dia are browsers for work, not leisure
Before we get into the timing of the deal, it’s worth looking at what Atlassian is actually buying.
This deal extends the software giant’s reach from workflow tools into the browser experience itself. Because Arc and Dia aren’t your standard browsers; they’re designed to reshape how people work online.
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Arc is a design-driven browser known for replacing the traditional row of tabs with a sidebar and offering tools like “Spaces” to group projects, built-in split views, and a focus on cleaner, distraction-free browsing.
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Dia, launched in June, is its AI-first counterpart. It’s a mix of browser and chatbot that can reportedly chat with your tabs, move data between spreadsheets, pull calendar events from Gmail, and summarise files or emails on the fly. Together, they represent a shift from passive web surfing to browsers built around work and heavier-duty tasks.
For Atlassian, which already sells Jira, Confluence, Trello and Loom, it’s the obvious next step to stitching workflows together.
Atlassian CEO Mike Cannon-Brookes was himself an early Arc user and apparently a ‘prolific’ bug reporter for the browser.
He said the purchase was about reimagining the browser for work rather than leisure.
“Browsers were built for the wrong era,” Cannon-Brookes said.
“AI changes that equation – it means the browser can become your memory of everything you’ve done at work.”
Still, he stressed Arc and Dia are not meant to compete head-on with Google Chrome or Microsoft Edge.
“They do a very good job. But they’re built for everyone, and that limits what they can do for specialists. Our goal isn’t six billion users, it’s the billion knowledge workers who need a better tool.”
Atlassian gets in as the AI competition heats up
Cannon-Brookes might say this isn’t a competition, but the timing is certainly interesting.
“I think the winner of the AI browser space is going to be crowned in the next 12 to 24 months,” The Browser Company CEO Josh Miller told The Verge.
Backed by Atlassian’s scale and sales muscle, Dia now has a chance to reach mainstream adoption rather than being swallowed by bigger players.
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And that’s important right now, even for ‘specialist’ browsers.
Over the past two months, the AI browser wars have gone from speculative to reality.
Perplexity debuted its Comet browser in July, positioning it as an “operating system” for the web. OpenAI quickly followed with plans for its own Chromium-based browser, built around its Operator AI agent.
Both are designed to push past search into an AI-native way of navigating the internet.
Atlassian’s acquisition also landed just days after Google successfully fought off a long-running US Department of Justice (DOJ) case over Chrome’s dominance.
Regulators had argued Alphabet was restricting competition, but a US judge ruled Chrome could remain in-house — a decision that keeps pressure on the browser market just as rivals ramp up their challenges.
Perplexity even lobbed a $52.9 billion bid for Chrome back in August, just in case it got broken off from Google.
The offer was always unlikely to succeed, even before the DOJ ruling. But it was a notable flex that pointed to the next AI battleground being in the browser space.
So it’s unsurprising that Atlassian would make this play. Not only does it put the business in the AI browser game (without having to build its own), but it has the potential to secure a large market share of “knowledge workers” who already spend their days on Jira, Confluence, Slack and Salesforce.
The timing also comes as Atlassian faces investor pressure. Shares are down 30% this year despite annual revenue rising to $US5.2 billion, and profitability remains elusive. The company has also faced scrutiny for redundancies, including Cannon-Brookes’ pre-recorded video message to announce 150 job cuts.
So this big swing offers Atlassian both a new growth story for investors and a hedge against being sidelined as AI browsers may very well become the next operating system for work.
