Today we’re excited to announce a new chapter in Trello’s story, and a new chapter for the story of the future of work.
Trello is being acquired by Atlassian.
We launched Trello five years ago at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference in San Francisco. At the time, the way people work was starting to shift. Smartphones began to change the way we connected and how we communicated with each other. People expected the tools they use at work to be as fun and easy to use as those in their personal lives. In the business world, the culture of teamwork began to change from face time and meetings to the rise of digital collaboration tools that let teammates collaborate anywhere, anytime.
Our small idea was to take the paradigm of a sticky note on a wall and turn it into a tool that allowed people to collaborate in real time. We wanted people to get started quickly and not get bogged down in structure. We wanted Trello to be fluid and adaptable to a huge range of problems that all revolved around getting people on the same page. Our dream was that someday we could have 100 million people using Trello to work together.
More than 19 million users later, Trello is used by everyone from the family planning their next vacation to employees at the largest enterprises in the world. Companies like Google, National Geographic, and even the United Kingdom’s government use Trello daily. Organizations like the United Nations and the Red Cross rely on Trello to accomplish their missions. We’ve been humbled and excited to see the millions of use cases for Trello around the world, and we build the product each day proudly knowing we’re helping teams do great things.
What Happens Next
We’re excited about partnering with Atlassian because we both share a philosophy of empowering teams everywhere to work in their own style. We envision a world where hundreds of millions of people collaborate in teams however they like, with their imaginations being the only constraint for what they can accomplish. As part of Atlassian, Trello will be able to leverage investments in R&D that will enhance the product in meaningful ways. Our team will be able to focus on improving the core experience of Trello for all users. We are certain that Atlassian understands the unique and novel reasons why Trello is so successful and well-loved.
In short: you can expect Trello to become even more awesome and more fun than it is today. We’re as committed to our original vision and brand as we were on launch day but we now have more firepower to fulfill that mission. We will continue operating as a standalone service, and we will continue to integrate deeply with all of the tools available out there that help people collaborate (and you can look forward to some great integrations with HipChat, Confluence and JIRA).
Thank you to all the Trello users out there who have helped make Trello what it is today. Without you, we’d all still be stuck with sticky notes on a wall. Your passion, feedback, and love for Trello inspire all of us to continue to make Trello more useful and delightful. We hope you are as excited as we are about our journey ahead.
Next: New! Trello Power-Ups For JIRA, Bitbucket, And Confluence Cloud (Plus A Cooler HipChat Integration)
Good or bad, we’d love to hear your thoughts. Find us on Twitter (@trello)!
