Australia-Based Atlassian Eyes Indian Startups Through Its $50 Mn Venture Fund

In a bid to tap into India’s growing startup ecosystem, Australia-based software firm Atlassian Corporation has launched a new $50 Mn global fund Atlassian Ventures to invest in startups that are building products in the overall Atlassian ecosystem.

The company, on Monday, also announced that it plans to expand its research and development centre in Bengaluru even further and is keen to nurture India’s vibrant startup ecosystem and rich technical talent pool.

“With India’s cloud market among the largest in the Asia Pacific region, we believe this fund will be an ideal opportunity for up-and-coming startups in India to access funding when building apps for our cloud products,” said Dinesh Ajmera, site lead and head of engineering at Atlassian Bengaluru.

The company, in its press statement, highlighted that it will invest in three types of companies — early-stage startups who are building apps for any of Atlassian’s cloud products, larger, more established ecosystem product partners that are scaling their businesses and sales channel partners looking to step up their cloud services and create new products. These investments will be made in partnership with institutional investors, targeting Series A onwards.

Atlassian has more than 4,200 apps already available in its marketplace. These apps include proprietary issue tracking product Jira, collaborative workspace Confluence, web-based version control repository hosting service Bitbucket and collaboration tool Trello. The company also offers integrations with popular tools like Slack, Zendesk, and GitHub.

The Australian company has more than 174K customers across large and small organisations including General Motors, Walmart Labs, Bank of America Merrill Lynch, Lyft, Verizon, Spotify and NASA.

According to a Inc42 Plus report, ‘The State Of Indian Startup Ecosystem Report 2020’ more than 55,000 startups were launched in India in the last five and half years alone, out of which over 3,200 startups raised $63 Bn in funding. The digital boom and technology disruption, especially in the current times, has led to the increased interest of investors, particularly in the tech-domain.

As per Inc42 Plus’ Annual Tech Startup Funding Report for 2019, the deeptech sector raised over $136.14 Mn in 2019. While the drop was pretty small in the context of the overall ecosystem, but for the nascent deeptech sector it was a big drop. There were a lot of expectations from this sector in 2020, however, the entire startup ecosystem was impacted due to the pandemic.