Atlassian Corp. on Thursday said it has agreed to buy The Browser Company, maker of the Arc and artificial intelligence (AI)-powered Dia browsers, for $610 million in cash.
The deal, expected to close later this year, comes a day after a federal judge ruled Alphabet Inc.’s Google is not required to sell its Chrome browser following a landmark antitrust case won by the Department of Justice and state attorney’s general last year.
“Today’s browsers weren’t built for work; they were built for browsing. This deal is a bold step forward in reimagining the browser for knowledge work in the AI era,” Atlassian CEO Mike Cannon-Brookes said in a statement. “Together, we’ll create an AI-powered browser optimized for the many SaaS applications living in tabs — one that knowledge workers will love to use every day.”
The Browser Company CEO Josh Miller said by teaming up with Atlassian, a leading provider of team collaboration and productivity software, “we can move faster, dream bigger, and focus on building an AI browser for work that people genuinely love to use — one that is trusted by companies but feels personal to every individual.”
Miller added the acquisition means “our largest vision, a cross-platform browser as an OS, is now closer than ever,” he said.
Atlassian executives said it was fair to conclude the deal will ultimately create an AI-powered ChromeOS competitor for enterprise customers. (Both Arc and Dia are Chromium-enabled.) Dia, for example, will be optimized for Atlassian’s SaaS apps, allowing workers to “connect the dots between apps, tabs, and tasks,” Sanchan Saxena, head of product at the company, told The Register.
Atlassian’s move could portend even more jockeying among AI vendors as the browser market goes through tumultuous change as millions of users opt for AI search instead of market leader Chrome, which still commands more than 3 billion users. Before the federal judge’s decision to keep Chrome as part of Google, would-be suitors Perplexity AI and Search.com made unsolicited bids for Chrome while OpenAI expressed interest. Google, too, has made heavy investments into turning Gemini, its AI chatbot, into an extension — if not successor — to Chrome.
Meanwhile, Apple Inc., which has shown interest in acquiring Perplexity according to some reports, is considering using Google technology to add AI search capabilities to Siri as early as spring 2026 in its bid to take on OpenAI ChatGPT and others.
