Atlassian’s $1bn Acquisition of DX
- Feb 2
- 5 min read
Updated: Feb 3
By Gilles Michaud and Marc Bellon (HEC Paris), Alvaro Aguilar De Nalda (ESADE); Edoardo Roveda, Alesha Jaswal, Mikhail Sinev, and Cooper Wu (University College London)
Photo: Stephen Dawson (Unsplash)
Overview of the deal
Acquirer: Atlassian Corporation
Target: DX
Implied Equity Value: Approximately $1 billion in cash and restricted stock
Total Transaction Size: ~ $1 billion
Closed date: Announced September 18, 2025 and completed on November 10, 2025
Target advisor: Fenwick & West LLP (legal)
Acquirer advisor: Baker McKenzie (legal)
Atlassian has agreed to buy DX for about $1 billion in cash and stock, making this one of the company’s largest acquisitions to date. DX is a software platform that gives engineering leaders data and insights into developer productivity and the impact of AI tools on engineering teams. By bringing DX into its product portfolio, Atlassian aims to give customers a better way to measure whether their investments in AI and engineering tools are actually helping teams work better. This acquisition fits into Atlassian’s strategy of expanding its “System of Work” — a suite of tools (like Jira, Bitbucket, Compass…) that help organizations plan, build, and track work across teams. Nearly all of DX’s enterprise customers (such as Dropbox, Pinterest, and BNY Mellon) already use Atlassian products, which could make it easier to integrate DX into Atlassian’s ecosystem and grow adoption. The deal closed in late 2025 and is expected to strengthen Atlassian’s position in helping companies realize value from AI investments and improve developer productivity at scale
“Using AI is easy, creating value is harder. Today’s announcement is about helping our 300,000+ customers understand if they’re making the right investments to win in the AI era.” Mike Cannon‑Brookes – Co-Founder & CEO, Atlassian
Company Details (Acquirer - Atlassian)
Atlassian is a global enterprise software company built around collaboration, work management, and software development workflows, anchored by flagship products such as Jira, Confluence, and Jira Service Management. Founded in 2002 and headquartered in Sydney, Australia, Atlassian has scaled a cloud-first subscription model and positioned its platform strategy around connecting business and technical teams through its “System of Work,” with a large enterprise footprint alongside a broad SMB base.
Founded: 2002
Headquartered: Sydney, Australia
CEO: Mike Cannon-Brookes
Number of Employees*: 13,813
Market Cap*: ~$34.67 Billion USD
EV*: ~$34 Billion USD
LTM Revenue*: ~$5.46 Billion USD
LTM EBITDA*: ~$0 - $0.1 Billion USD
LTM EV/Revenue*: ~6.3x
LTM EV/EBITDA*: N/A
Recent Transactions: The Browser Company (~$610 million, Sept 2025)
*As of 26/01/2026
Company Details (Target - DX)
DX is a private developer intelligence platform that helps engineering firms evaluate, understand, measure, and improve developer productivity and satisfaction by collecting a mix of qualitative and quantitative data across the software development lifecycle. Its tools provide engineering leaders insights into bottlenecks, developer experience, and ROI per developer, and are used by a number of large enterprises including Dropbox, Block, Pinterest, and others. DX focuses on helping companies understand the quantitative impact of AI tools on engineering workflows.
Founded: 2020
Headquartered: Salt Lake City, Utah, USA
CEO: Abi Noda
Number of Employees*: ~200
Market Cap*: N/A
EV*: ~$1 Billion USD (based on acquisition value)
LTM Revenue*: N/A
LTM EBITDA*: N/A
LTM EV/Revenue*: N/A
LTM EV/EBITDA*: N/A
*As of 26/01/2026
Projections and Assumptions
Short-Term Consequences
Atlassian’s acquisition of DX is framed as a product and platform enhancement rather than a short-term financial optimization play, intended to help enterprises understand whether AI investments are translating into improved software delivery outcomes. Atlassian highlighted that many of DX’s enterprise customers already use Atlassian, positioning the combination as an extension of its existing customer workflow data and tooling footprint.
From a transaction standpoint, Atlassian agreed to acquire DX for approximately $1.0bn in a mix of cash and restricted stock, and stated at announcement that the deal would not affect its FY2027 non-GAAP operating margin target. The company later confirmed that the acquisition closed on November 10, 2025, shifting near-term focus from deal completion to execution and integration.
Market reaction was relatively muted, with shares showing a modest positive move (around +1% premarket) as investors largely viewed the transaction through a strategic lens. Commentary centered on the strategic fit of DX’s engineering intelligence capabilities, Atlassian’s ability to integrate the platform effectively, and capital allocation discipline given the size of the transaction.
Long-Term Upsides
Over the long term, the acquisition of DX enhances Atlassian’s strategic ambition to move beyond collaboration software toward a more comprehensive operating layer for modern software organisations. By incorporating developer productivity and engineering intelligence into its platform, Atlassian gains exposure to a higher-value decision surface that increasingly informs resourcing, investment prioritisation, and AI deployment across enterprises. This positions the company to engage more directly in executive-level discussions around technology efficiency and return on innovation spend.
The integration of DX’s analytics capabilities also supports Atlassian’s enterprise monetisation strategy. As customers seek to rationalise tooling and consolidate vendors, the ability to offer workflow execution alongside performance insight within a single ecosystem may justify expanded contracts and longer customer lifecycles. Over time, this could support structurally higher average contract values and reinforce Atlassian’s competitive positioning in large, complex organisations with distributed engineering teams.
From a product perspective, DX provides a data foundation that may accelerate Atlassian’s AI roadmap. Proprietary insight into development patterns and productivity dynamics can be leveraged to enhance automation, predictive analytics, and decision support across the platform. If successfully embedded, this intelligence layer could increase switching costs and reduce customer reliance on third-party analytics tools.
Collectively, these factors suggest the acquisition has the potential to contribute to durable, long-term value creation, provided Atlassian can translate analytical capability into widely adopted, mission-critical functionality.
Risks and Uncertainties
Notwithstanding its strategic rationale, the acquisition carries execution-related risks that could limit long-term value realisation. A key uncertainty lies in the depth of customer adoption. While developer analytics are increasingly discussed at the enterprise level, converting interest into sustained usage and incremental spend remains uncertain. If DX’s capabilities are perceived as supplementary rather than integral to core workflows, the commercial impact may fall short of expectations.
Integration risk also remains material. Embedding a specialised analytics platform into a broader software suite requires careful product design to avoid added complexity or performance trade-offs. Failure to deliver a coherent and intuitive user experience could slow adoption and dilute the perceived strategic importance of the offering.
There is further risk associated with market positioning. DX historically benefited from a degree of tool-agnostic credibility, which may be reduced following full integration into Atlassian’s ecosystem. Organisations operating heterogeneous development environments may be reluctant to adopt analytics perceived as optimised for a single vendor, potentially constraining addressable demand.
In addition, the developer productivity analytics space remains competitive and rapidly evolving. Advances by independent providers or competing platform vendors could erode differentiation, particularly if industry standards around measurement fail to converge. Heightened sensitivity around workforce data, monitoring, and privacy may also introduce regulatory or reputational risks if analytics are viewed as intrusive rather than enabling.