Why Atlassian is Spending One Billion on DX to Measure Developer Productivity

Atlassian has agreed to acquire DX, a developer productivity insight platform, for $1 billion in cash and restricted stock. The deal, announced Thursday, marks Atlassian’s largest acquisition to date and its second this month following the purchase of The Browser Company.

DX, founded five years ago by Abi Noda and Greyson Junggren, provides analytics that help enterprises understand how productive their engineering teams are and identify bottlenecks in software development. The company works with more than 350 enterprise customers, including ADP, Adyen, Dropbox, and BNY Mellon, and has tripled its customer base annually since emerging from stealth in 2022. DX raised less than $5 million in venture funding before agreeing to the transaction.

Noda, who previously worked as a product manager at GitHub, said the motivation to start DX came from frustration with the tools available to measure productivity. “The assumptions we had about what we needed to help ship products faster were quite different than what the teams and developers were saying was getting in their way,” he told TechCrunch in 2022. “Even teams didn’t always have awareness about their own issues and leadership.”

That premise has guided DX’s approach: blending quantitative metrics with qualitative input from developers. The company’s goal has been to provide visibility into engineering performance without reducing productivity measurement to surveillance.