Atlassian files IPO papers

Atlassian All Hands April 2015
From left to right: Atlassian co-founders and co-CEOs Scott Farquhar and Mike Cannon-Brooks; president Jay Simons
Photograph by Aundray Cheam

Teenaged collaboration software unicorn Atlassian, last valued at $3.3 billion and rare for the priority it places on profitable growth, could be public by the end of the year.

Like mobile payments company Square did last summer, the 13-year-old company has filed a confidential prospectus under the Jumpstart Our Business Startups Act, according to a Wall Street Journal report published Friday.

The article cites sources close to the matter. Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley were tapped to work on the initial public offering, the Journal reported.

A spokesperson for Atlassian said the company has no comment on the report.

Atlassian, founded by Scott Farquhar and Mike Cannon-Brooks, is fond of talking up a “viral” sales model that helps it close corporate contracts with relatively low marketing and sales overhead compared with competitors. Its flagship products include project management tools such as JIRA, a favorite among software developers; or its collaboration platforms Confluence and HipChat.

That same approach has also helped dozens of developers that have built more than 1,800 add-on tools to complement Atlassian’s products. Earlier this week, the company said sales of these products through its marketplace have topped $100 million over the past three years.

Atlassian counts 48,000 customers, including Citigroup, Coca-Cola, eBay, NASA, and Netflix.

The company brought in a new CFO in mid-February, Erik Bardman, which many took as a signal that an IPO was in the offing. His resume includes stints at Roku, Logitech International, and eBay Marketplaces.

Last spring, Atlassian President Jay Simons brushed off Fortune‘s question about IPO timing. “We feel like best-in-class companies are public. They compete on the public stage, which provides a certain scrutiny and discipline,” he said at the time. “Then again, we’ve run our business that way for some time.”

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