The Browser Company, maker of Arc and Dia, is being acquired

alyaza [they/she]

Mike Cannon-Brookes, the CEO of enterprise software giant Atlassian, was one of the first users of the Arc browser. Over the last several years, he has been a prolific bug reporter and feature requester. Now he’ll own the thing: Atlassian is acquiring The Browser Company, the New York-based startup that makes both Arc and the new AI-focused Dia browser. Atlassian is paying $610 million in cash for The Browser Company, and plans to run it as an independent entity.

The acquisition is mostly about Dia, which launched in June. Dia is a mix of web browser and chatbot, with a built-in way to chat with your tabs but also do things across apps. Open up three spreadsheets in three tabs and Dia can move data between them; log into your Gmail and Dia can tell you what’s next on the calendar. Anything with a URL immediately becomes data available to Dia and its AI models. For a company like Atlassian, which makes a whole suite of work apps — the popular project-tracker Jira, the note-taking app Confluence, plus Trello, Loom, and more — a way to stitch them all together seems obviously compelling.

James R Kirk

I don’t understand, $600M? Is anyone using this browser?

bunkyprewster@startrek.website

I use Arc, and really love it. But plan to avoid the AI dreck

genderneutralbro@lemmy.sdf.org

That can’t be good. But I guess it was inevitable. It never seemed like Arc had a sustainable business model.

It was obvious from the get-go that their ChatGPT integration was a money pit that would eventually need to be monetized, and…I just don’t see end users paying money for it. They’ve been giving it away for free hoping to get people hooked, I guess, but I know what the ChatGPT API costs and it’s never going to be viable. If they built a local-only backend then maybe. I mean, at least then they wouldn’t have costs that scale with usage.

For Atlassian, though? Maybe. Their enterprise customers are already paying out the nose. Usage-based pricing is a much easier sell. And they’re entrenched deeply enough to enshittify successfully.

souperk@reddthat.com

Arc is fairly good, and I was willing to tolerate the few hiccups when it was constantly being improved. Of course, I switched to zen.

padraig

BCNY is such a weird company. They started out as a “Hey, browsers are a bit crap, let’s fix it” and they made Arc. Arc was fantastic. Used it daily on my Mac. They were doing cool stuff overall.

And then as soon as AI became more popularised, Josh (the CEO) went complete “tech bro” with it and started shoving AI in Arc (Arc Max) and then other problems with the browser started appearing, and the updates were few and far in between. There were promises to fix it, but they never materialised.

And then they made Dia. Dia could have been an extension/add-on for browsers.

$600M+ for BCNY is wild, though. Atlassian obviously has money to burn…

RickRussell_CA

Oh. Arc and Dia.