The intelligence and ingenuity of Indian knowledge workersis no secret. A popular Australian IT company with products like Jira,Confluence, Bitbucket and Trello in its portfolio is all set to invest instartups and established companies.
Atlassian Ventures, a new $50 million global fund that willinvest startups, including established companies that are already buildingproducts in its ecosystem.
The company which set up a research and development centrein Bengaluru last year with plans to expand it further, said it is keen tonurture India's vibrant startup ecosystem and rich technical talent pool.
"With India's cloud market among the largest in theAsia Pacific region, we believe this fund will be an ideal opportunity forup-and-coming startups in India to access funding when building apps for ourcloud products," said Dinesh Ajmera, Site Lead and Head of Engineering,Bengaluru, Atlassian.
"India is a significant market for Atlassian, onethat's teeming with an extraordinary developer community and a vibrant startupecosystem that we plan to tap into," he added.
Atlassian Ventures will invest in three types of companies.
Firstly, the early-stage startups which are building appsfor any of Atlassian's cloud products.
"Secondly, the larger, more established ecosystemproduct partners who are ascaling their businesses and finally, the existingsales channel partners who are looking to step up their cloud services andcreate new products that support the future of teamwork," the companyinformed.
As part of this programme, companies that receive fundingare also eligible for mentorship as well as global exposure at Atlassianevents," Ajmera said.
In July, Atlassian Chief Technology Officer (CTO) SriViswanath said that the company plans to hire 300 more people over the nextyear in addition to 200 it has recruited for the R&D facility and thesupport centre.
He noted that Bengaluru had some of the brightest tech talentin the entire world, and claimed that he was positive that the work done inIndia would help the company get 100 million active users.
The company currently has over 4,200 apps available in itsMarketplace and offers integrations with popular tools like Slack, Zendesk andGitHub.