Atlassian Corp. Plc. today said that it has acquired Chartio Inc., a San Francisco-based business intelligence startup backed by investors such as Y Combinator.

Publicly traded Atlassian is the company behind the popular Jira family of work management tools, which are used by teams in areas such as software development to coordinate their activities. The company also provides Trello, another bestselling project management application, as well as a variety of other software products.

Chartio has built a cloud-based business intelligence platform that can visualize data such as quarterly sales figures in graphs. The platform generates pie charts, maps, bar graphs and a variety of other visualizations.

The company has kept a relatively low profile, raising only about $7 million in funding over the course of 10 years, but nonetheless managed to establish a substantial market presence. The startup claims 280,000 users have created 10.5 million charts on its platform to date.

According to Atlassian, the plan is to integrate Chartio’s data visualization capabilities into the Jira product family. The company didn’t specify exactly how it will apply the startup’s technology in the blog post announcing the deal today.

One application Atlassian could explore for the Chartio platform is helping companies track their developers’ productivity. Software teams use Atlassian’s Jira tool to address issues in their code: the tool provides the ability to create tickets for bugs and mark those tickets as solved once the bugs are fixed. Using Chartio’s data visualization features, Atlassian could distill Jira bug tickets into graphs to give managers insights at a glance into metrics such as the amount of time it takes developers to fix software issues and how many are still outstanding.

Jira also comes in an edition known as Jira Service Management. That version of the tool is used by companies to process internal help desk requests, such as technical inquiries sent by employees to the information technology department. Just as bug tickets can contain insights into developer productivity, so could help desk inquiries, when combined with business intelligence software, provide information on the effectiveness of support agents.

Atlassian hinted in the blog post that it eventually also plans to integrate Chartio’s software into other products besides Jira.

The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. Chartio notified customers in an update posted to its website that its platform will shut down on March 1, 2022.

Atlassian is no stranger to using acquisitions to extend its product portfolio. The company bought the Trello project management tool in a $425 million deal four years ago. More recently, last May, Atlassian acquired venture-backed startup Halp Inc. for an undisclosed sum to extend its help desk and customer support capabilities.

Photo: Atlassian