Who owns Atlassian? Ownership structure explained (2026)

Atlassian is one of the largest software companies to come out of Australia, and its products sit inside the daily workflow of millions of technical and business teams. Jira tracks the work, Confluence documents it, Trello organizes it, and a growing set of tools around them handle service management, code, and, increasingly, artificial intelligence. The company sells almost entirely by subscription, and that recurring revenue is what the stock market values.

Ownership is where Atlassian gets more interesting than a typical enterprise software name. On paper it is a widely traded Nasdaq company. In practice, two founders who started it with credit card debt in Sydney still hold the keys, because a second class of stock hands them ten votes per share. That gap between who owns the economics and who controls the votes shapes every major decision the company makes.

This article breaks down who actually owns Atlassian: the founders and their super-voting shares, the institutions that hold the ordinary stock, the board, and the governance structure that keeps control concentrated at the top.

Atlassian was founded in 2002 in Sydney, Australia, by Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar, who had met as computer science students at the University of New South Wales. They bootstrapped the business with about A$10,000 of credit card debt and stayed profitable for years before taking any outside money. The company's first product, the Jira issue tracker, became the standard tool for software teams to plan and track work, and Confluence added the documentation layer alongside it.

The business model is subscription software sold to teams, historically with very low sales-and-marketing spend because the products spread through self-service adoption. Today the portfolio spans Jira, Confluence, Trello, Bitbucket, Jira Service Management, the video tool Loom, and a layer of AI features branded Rovo. For fiscal year 2025, which ended June 30, 2025, Atlassian reported total revenue of $5.22 billion, up 20% year over year, with subscriptions making up about 95% of that total. The company is headquartered in Sydney and incorporated in Delaware, and its shares trade on the Nasdaq under the symbol TEAM.

Atlassian is a publicly held company. It completed its initial public offering in December 2015 on the Nasdaq and has traded there ever since. It is not owned by a parent company or a private equity firm. What separates it from a standard public company is its two-tier share structure: the ordinary Class A stock that trades in the market carries one vote per share, while the Class B stock held by the founders carries ten votes per share. That mechanism lets a minority economic owner keep majority voting control, a setup that a valuation exercise using a standard business valuation calculator would not capture on its own.

The bulk of Atlassian's control sits with its two founders. According to the company's 2025 proxy statement, Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar each beneficially owned about 48 million shares of Class B common stock. Together they hold essentially all of the company's super-voting Class B stock, roughly 96 million shares in total. That stake represents about a third of Atlassian's total shares outstanding on an economic basis, but because each Class B share carries ten votes, it translates into around 85% of the total voting power.

Individually, each founder controlled roughly 42.6% of the combined voting power as of the proxy's record date. Their Class A holdings are negligible; the control comes almost entirely from the Class B shares. This is the clearest fact about who owns Atlassian: the public owns most of the economics, and the two founders own most of the votes.

Atlassian is unusual because it was profitable and self-funded for its first eight years and never ran a conventional venture-capital fundraising campaign. Its outside rounds were secondary transactions, where investors bought existing shares rather than injecting new capital, mostly to give founders and employees liquidity. The IPO is what brought outside capital onto the balance sheet.

Because the founders hold the Class B stock, the institutions that show up in filings own the ordinary Class A shares and therefore hold economic stakes far larger than their voting weight. The Vanguard Group is the largest, with about 15.97 million Class A shares, or roughly 9.55% of the Class A stock, which works out to only about 1.42% of total voting power. BlackRock held about 8.96 million Class A shares, or roughly 5.36% of that class. Baillie Gifford, the Scottish growth investor, held about 8.81 million Class A shares, or about 5.27%. These are passive and index-driven positions for the most part, and none of them comes close to challenging founder control.

Atlassian has been public since 2015, so there are no IPO signals to watch. The structural point that matters is the sunset on the dual-class shares. Class B shares convert automatically into Class A shares when they are transferred outside the founders' permitted holdings, and the whole dual-class structure is designed to wind down over time. Until then, control stays with Cannon-Brookes and Farquhar regardless of how much Class A stock the public accumulates.

Mike Cannon-Brookes is the chief executive officer and a co-founder, and since September 2024 he has run the company alone after more than two decades of shared leadership. Scott Farquhar, the other co-founder, stepped down as co-CEO on August 31, 2024, but stayed on as a board member and special advisor, and he still holds his Class B stock. In practical terms the two founders remain the controlling shareholders together even though only one of them now runs day-to-day operations.

The finance seat has turned over recently. James Chuong, a longtime LinkedIn finance executive, became chief financial officer in 2026, succeeding Joe Binz, who retired effective June 30, 2026 after joining from Microsoft in 2022.

Atlassian's board had 11 directors as of the 2025 proxy. Shona L. Brown chairs the board. The other directors include the two founders, plus Scott Belsky, Karen Dykstra, Sasan Goodarzi, Christian Smith, Steven Sordello, Jason Warner, Richard P. Wong, and Michelle Zatlyn. As a group, all current executive officers and directors controlled about 85.21% of the total voting power, a figure that is almost entirely the founders' Class B stake. That means the board answers to a controlling pair of insiders rather than to a dispersed shareholder base.

The main governance concern is the dual-class structure itself. Two people control roughly 85% of the vote while owning about a third of the equity, so public shareholders cannot force a change in strategy, leadership, or board composition through their votes. Governance advisers generally flag this kind of arrangement as a risk because it removes the usual check that outside owners provide. Investors who prefer companies where votes track economics tend to look at more widely held enterprise software peers, such as how Salesforce is owned, where no founder holds a super-voting block. The trade-off is a familiar one across founder-led tech, and it echoes the founder-heavy ownership at Oracle, where a single insider's stake has long shaped the company's direction.

In February 2023 a putative securities class action was filed against Atlassian and certain officers in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, on behalf of investors who bought shares between August and November 2022. The complaint alleged that the company made misleading statements about its business and prospects during that window, when the stock fell sharply on a weaker outlook. Litigation of this type is common after a large stock drop, but it is a live disclosure item tied to the period.

Atlassian cut about 500 roles in March 2023, its first significant layoffs, as it rebalanced toward faster revenue growth than headcount growth. The company has since leaned harder on profitability and cash flow, a shift that shows up in operating margins and that investors track closely; an EBITDA calculator is one simple way to see how those efficiency gains flow through. Restructuring in a founder-controlled company carries less risk of shareholder pushback than it would elsewhere, because the vote sits with insiders.

The ownership structure explains why Atlassian can take long-horizon bets without worrying about an activist investor or a proxy fight. Cannon-Brookes and Farquhar can commit to multi-year platform shifts, absorb a bad quarter, or restructure the workforce, and no outside shareholder has the votes to stop them. For a company that spread through self-service adoption rather than a traditional sales machine, that patience has been an advantage, and it lets management prioritize product and pricing decisions that pay off slowly.

The flip side is accountability. When two insiders hold 85% of the vote, the ordinary market check on management is weak. If strategy drifts or leadership underperforms, public holders of the Class A stock have limited recourse beyond selling. That is a real consideration given how much the stock has swung, from above $100 billion in 2021 to a spring 2026 low and back to roughly $47 billion, so buyers of the Class A shares are taking on volatility without the voting power to influence outcomes.

For competitors and partners, the founder control signals continuity. Atlassian's direction has been consistent for two decades because the same people have set it, and that stability matters in enterprise software, where customers commit to platforms for years. It also shapes how the company positions against rivals. When Atlassian exited team chat, it handed its Stride and HipChat technology to a partner and pointed customers toward Slack's ownership under Salesforce, a deal a founder-controlled board could strike quickly. Its competition with developer platforms owned by Microsoft's diversified shareholder base is a study in the opposite governance model.

For anyone valuing the business, the structure is a reminder that Atlassian is a subscription company first. Its worth rests on recurring revenue, retention, and margin expansion rather than on any near-term change of control, and the broader shift toward this model is visible across the sector's SaaS marketing statistics. The founders are not selling control, so the investment case is about the software, not the cap table.

Mike Cannon-Brookes is the chief executive officer of Atlassian. He co-founded the company in 2002 and became sole CEO on September 1, 2024, after his co-founder Scott Farquhar stepped down from the co-CEO role.

Yes. Atlassian has traded on the Nasdaq under the ticker TEAM since its December 2015 IPO. However, it is controlled by its founders through a dual-class share structure, so its voting power is not held by the public market.

Atlassian was founded by Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar in Sydney, Australia, in 2002. They met as computer science students at the University of New South Wales and funded the company with credit card debt.

By voting power, the biggest shareholders are the two founders, who together hold almost all of the super-voting Class B stock and roughly 85% of the vote. Among institutional holders of the ordinary Class A stock, The Vanguard Group is the largest at about 9.55%, followed by BlackRock at about 5.36% and Baillie Gifford at about 5.27%.

Atlassian went public in 2015 at a valuation near $4.4 billion. Its market value climbed above $100 billion during the 2021 software boom, then fell steeply. As of September 2, 2026, its market capitalization was about $47.2 billion, recovered from a low reached in spring 2026.

Very little in the traditional sense. Atlassian was profitable and self-funded for its first eight years. Its pre-IPO rounds, including a $60 million investment from Accel Partners in 2010 and about $150 million led by T. Rowe Price in 2014, were mostly secondary sales that let founders and employees cash out rather than fresh capital for the business.