Atlassian to buy enterprise video messaging platform Loom for nearly $1B

Today, Australian enterprise software major Atlassian announced it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire asynchronous video messaging platform Loom for $975 million.

The deal, probably one of the biggest in the category, expands Atlassian’s software portfolio, which already includes major work-centric collaboration tools such as Jira, Confluence and Trello. The company said it is working to integrate Loom’s capabilities across these and other products but has not shared a specific timeline yet.

“The distribution Atlassian can provide Loom and vice versa is going to create a lot of customer value that would take much longer to create solo,” Vinay Hiremath, the co-founder and CTO of Loom, wrote on the X platform. He added that the companies will continue to add value to the Loom product and that the synergies between them will mark a massive leap forward in how teams work.

Loom’s rise in async video space

Founded in 2016 by Joe Thomas Jr., Shahed Khan and Hiremath, Loom started off as an end-to-end async video messaging platform to give enterprise users an easy way to collaborate and communicate. Over the years, the platform grew with new capabilities such as browser extensions and integrations with platforms such as Slack, Gmail and Asana. It raised over $200 million across multiple rounds and was valued at over $1.5 billion after its series C round led by Andreessen Horowitz in 2021. 

At the end of 2022, post the Covid spike, the company said it had more than 18 million users representing more than 350,000 businesses. This year, Hiremath said, the platform is witnessing over 7 million Loom recordings every month, up from 1 million in 2019. It also launched a bunch of AI-based features, including transcription in 50 languages and generative titles and summaries, a few months ago.

Atlassian, on the other hand, has been in the work collaboration space for years. With each platform in its portfolio, the company targets a different segment for work. Jira, for instance, helps with tracking issues or tasks through a predefined and customizable workflow, while Confluence helps teams to collaborate and share knowledge efficiently. It has a market cap of over $49 billion and works with the majority of the Fortune 500 and over 260,000 companies of all sizes worldwide, including NASA, Kiva, Deutsche Bank and Salesforce.

What to expect from this deal?

With Loom coming under its umbrella, Atlassian plans to enhance each of these products with built-in video capabilities, giving distributed knowledge workers a better way to plan, track and execute their work.

“This is where async video comes in, a tool increasingly sitting side-by-side with other modes of communication like text, presentations, and spreadsheets. Loom’s leadership in async video combined with Atlassian’s deep understanding of team collaboration means we can bring innovation to the market and empower our customers to collaborate in richer, more human ways,” Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar, the co-founders of Atlassian, wrote in a joint blog post.

While it remains to be seen how exactly the integration will be executed, the co-founders did share a hint of what is to come. On Jira, for instance, engineers will be able to visually log issues. In other cases, leaders will be able to use videos to connect with their employees at scale, sales teams will be able to send tailored video updates to clients right from within their workflows and HR teams will onboard new employees with personalized welcome videos.

Further, both companies’ combined investments in AI will help enterprise users to seamlessly transition between video, transcripts, summaries, documents, and the workflows derived from them, they added.

The integration will begin post the closing of the deal, which is expected in the quarter ending March 2024. Loom, meanwhile, will continue to be available as a standalone product.

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