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Atlassian buys its way into Cloud9

Australian-headquartered software group Atlassian has invested an undisclosed amount in Dutch Software as a Service (SaaS) business Cloud9, in the company's second investment since it took $60 million in venture capital funding in July last year.
Written by Renai LeMay, Contributor

Australian-headquartered software group Atlassian has invested an undisclosed amount in Dutch Software as a Service (SaaS) business Cloud9, in the company's second investment since it took $60 million in venture capital funding in July last year.

In a statement published overnight, Cloud9 said that it had taken $5.5 million in Series A funding from Atlassian, and Atlassian's own venture capital firm Accel Partners.

The company, which provides an integrated development environment on an SaaS-basis for Javascript developers, said that it would use the money to open headquarters in San Francisco — where Atlassian also has a growing office — and continue to develop its business.

Atlassian co-founder and chief executive Scott Farquhar said in the statement that Atlassian, which itself provides a number of SaaS tools to developers, is "incredibly excited" to be an investor in Cloud9. "Development in the cloud is a trend that is growing quickly, and Cloud9 is in a unique position to provide web application developers with one-stop cloud development for web and mobile applications," he said.

Cloud9 said that Atlassian is "as enthusiastic about the partnership" as the Dutch firm is. "With Atlassian backing us, we have the world's best development process company to assist us on both process and the business side of things," the company said. "They are a leading developer of collaboration tools [eg. Jira and Confluence], and they fully understand our vision."

Atlassian itself has a substantial presence in Amsterdam, where it has based its European headquarters, and is hiring for more staff, with its website listing half a dozen jobs in the location.

The investment is the second known outlay since Atlassian took a major round of Accel Partners funding last year. In September, the company bought Bitbucket.org, a web-hosted service with 60,000 users. Like Cloud9, the company provides an SaaS offering; BitBucket.org is a hosted code collaboration provider for the open source Mercurial distributed version control system (DVCS).

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