Published on the 18/09/2025 | Written by Heather Wright
The browser as active team mate…
In Atlassian’s vision for the future, your browser will be your active team mate: Context aware, able to automate routine tasks and proactively surfacing what matters most, while keeping your data secure.
It’s a vision Sanchan Saxena, Atlassian head of product, believes will set the Australian company apart from other browser players such as Google and Microsoft whose focus he says has been more on consumer-scale use cases.
“We hope to fundamentally transform how customers work by making the browser an active, intelligent partner in their daily workflows.”
“Our differentiator will be deep integration with the tools knowledge workers use, a relentless focus on productivity and collaboration and a commitment to openness and user choice,” Saxena told iStart.
“We believe there’s room for a browser purpose-built for work, not just for browsing.”
The company took a US$610 million deep dive into the browser market earlier this month with news it’s buying United States AI browser developer The Browser Company, which makes the Arc and Dia browsers. Atlassian’s venture arm was already an early investor in the company (which raised US$75.5 million in series A funding in 2023, followed by US$50m Series B in 2024), alongside Salesforce Ventures, LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman, GitHub’s Jason Warner and Medium’s Ev Williams.
Atlassian, which says it has more than 300,000 customers, including more than 80 percent of the Fortune 500, as customers for its products which include Trello, Confluence, and Jira, is big on the future of the browser, with Saxena saying there’s ‘renewed energy and competition’ in the browser space.
“We believe the browser is the gateway to modern work, yet today’s browsers were built for passive browsing, not for getting work done,” Saxena says.
Knowledge work happens across dozens of SaaS apps, he says and the browser is where it all comes together, but browsers haven’t evolved to meet the needs of teams building, creating and collaborating every day.
Atlassian’s 2025 State of Teams report noted that workers have more information than ever, but they’ve never been less informed, with the survey of 12,000 knowledge workers and 200 executives finding leaders and teams waste 25 percent of their time searching for answers. Other reports have repeatedly flagged the issue of context-switching as users are forced to switch between apps, and its impacts on productivity, cognitive load and mental fatigue.
That information overload and context-switching fatigue is something Atlassian is targeting with the deal and it’s plans to develop the Dia browser – the main focus of the purchase – into an ‘enterprise-grade’ browser for knowledge workers – one that incorporates the context from SaaS applications without the need for constant switching.
The Browser Company’s Arc browser, launched in 2023 and attracting a dedicated and enthusiastic user base, though far from going mainstream, will not be discontinued, Saxena promises, and will continue to be maintained. Fans of the browser, built on Chromium, talk about it ‘reimagining’ browsers, with a focus on productivity and time saving, ad-blocking features and integrated productivity tools, including a whiteboard.
But it’s the Dia browser, currently in beta, which will be the focus. (Josh Miller, CEO and cofounder of The Browser Company announced earlier this year that Dia was to be the focus of the company moving forward, with Arc encountering a ‘novelty tax’ issue where it was simply too different, with too many new things to learn for too little reward for most people.)
“Our focus will be on bringing the best of Arc (SaaS features, power-user tools) and Dia (AI, speed, elegance) together,” Saxena says. “Branding decisions will be made as the integration progresses, but the beloved UX and design DNA of both browsers will remain central.”
He says the Dia browser won’t just be for Atlassian customers.
“Our vision is to build a browser that works seamlessly with all major SaaS apps, not just Atlassian’s. The goal is to create a browser that feels personal to every individual, unlocking productivity for knowledge workers everywhere.”
Dia will be optimised for SaaS apps including email, project management and design, and ‘packed’ with AI skills and personal work memory to ‘connect the dots’ between apps, tabs and tasks, he says.
“We hope to fundamentally transform how customers work by making the browser an active, intelligent partner in their daily workflows.”
Rather than switching between dozens of SaaS apps, tabs and tools, leading to lost context, fragmented information and productivity drag, Saxena says with Dia, Atlassian wants to create a browser which understands a user’s work context, surfaces the relevant information from across favourite apps and uses AI to automate repetitive tasks.
While the focus will be on Dia as an enterprise tool, he says it will remain accessible for individual users – it has gained some traction as a consumer browser (it’s available in beta to Arc users) – ‘but with added capabilities and controls for business needs’.
Both the business and pricing models for Dia are still being determined, he says.
So why spend big on buying the browser, rather than building its own offering? Saxena says building a browser from scratch is highly specialised and requires deep expertise in cross-platform compatibility, extensions and design.
“The Browser Company has proven they can reimagine the browser experience, as seen with Arc and Dia. By combining their design and technical know-how with Atlassian’s two decades of understanding how teams work, we can move faster and deliver a browser purpose-built for knowledge work in the AI era,” he says.
“We’re at the beginning of a once-in-a-generation shift in how people work online. By combining The Browser Company’s innovation in browser design with Atlassian’s expertise in team collaboration and AI, we’re building a browser that’s not just smart, but genuinely a joy to use. Our mission is to unleash the potential of every team – now at the very heart of where work happens: The browser.”
The deal is the largest for Atlassian since its October 2023 purchase of the Loom video messaging tool for $975 million – a purchase followed in August 2024 by the acquisition of AI-powered video meeting recording and post meeting assistant Rewatch to integrate with Loom.
The Browser Company acquisition is expected to close in the second quarter of Atlassian’s fiscal year 2026, subject to closing conditions and regulatory approvals.
