Atlassian

Atlassian was founded in Sydney in 2002 by two university classmates, Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar, who started it with credit card debt instead of investors. It makes software for teams to organize their work, and its best-known products are everywhere in tech offices even if the company name is not.

Jira is a tool for tracking work as tickets: each bug, feature or task gets a card with a description, an owner, a priority and a status, and moves across a board from "to do" to "done". Software teams use it to run agile sprints, and support, marketing and legal teams use it for their own requests. Confluence is a shared wiki where teams write and keep their documentation, meeting notes and plans, linked to the Jira tickets they talk about. Atlassian also owns Trello, simple card boards, and Bitbucket, a place to host code with git, among others.

It sells mostly through subscriptions priced per user, and for years was known for selling online without a big sales team. It went public on the Nasdaq in 2015. Like many software companies, it has pushed customers from installing its products on their own servers to using its cloud versions, and it now adds AI features, such as summarizing long tickets or pages.