Atlassian (TEAM) Buying Halp: Details About The Deal You Should Know

By Amit Chowdhry ● May 13, 2020
  • Atlassian Corporation PLC (NASDAQ:TEAM) recently announced it was buying a company called Halp. These are the details about the deal.

Atlassian Corporation PLC (NASDAQ:TEAM) recently announced it was buying a company called Halp. The terms of the deal were undisclosed.

What does Help do? Halp is known for helping companies set up integrated help desk ticketing and automated customer service within the Slack productivity platform.

Halp is based in Boulder, Colorado and the company was founded by Fletcher Richman, Komran Rashidov, Tristan Rubadeau.

And Atlassian is known for offering productivity platforms like issue tracking software Jira and list collaboration tool Trello. Plus it also runs a wiki collaboration tool called Confluence.

“Halp represents a new class of applications that are fundamentally changing how teams work. As real-time messaging becomes more prevalent in the workplace, companies are looking for solutions that are embedded within the team messaging tools they’ve already invested in,” said Steve Goldsmith, Head of Product at Integrations at Atlassian. “Halp turns Slack into an internal help desk solution that works for any team that fields questions via workplace messaging – like IT, Security, Legal, Finance, and Support, just to name a few. Once you add Halp to your Slack workspace, you can use a simple emoji reaction to turn any message into a ticket that tracks the progress and outcomes of inbound requests. It’s an easy, lightweight way to manage requests that gives users the option to configure a custom workflow underneath it, or simply use the default. Either way, Halp ensures requests are routed correctly and facilitates prompt resolution right there in Slack.”

A couple of years ago, Slack acquired HipChat from Atlassian. Atlassian and Slack also formed a partnership as part of the deal. As part of the partnership, HipChat was shutting down and the two companies agreed to work together to migrate all of its users over to Slack. This was also the case for Stride — which is a chat and collaboration successor tool to HipChat launched by Atlassian in 2017.

Help also recently announced its second product, which is called Help Answers. Halp Answers works seamlessly with the first product called Halp Tickets. And Halp Tickets makes it easier to create help desk tickets within Slack.

“We’re thrilled to hear that our strategic partner Atlassian is acquiring Halp,” added Brad Armstrong, VP of Business Development & Corporate Development at Slack. “With its messaging-first approach to support ticketing, Halp is an outstanding tool for any team already collaborating in Slack channels. We see enormous opportunities in building this business together with Atlassian.”

Halp is going to develop a deeper integration with the Atlassian suite. And the company will improve existing Jira and Confluence integrations and discovering the possibilities of Halp generating alerts in Opsgenie, cards in Trello, etc.

In a short amount of time, Halp went from launch to exit. Halp launched in 2017 and raised $2 million in seed funding on a $9.5 million post-valuation, according to PitchBook.

Disclosure: I own a small number of Atlassian shares. I wrote this article myself and I do not have any business relationship with any company whose stock I write about. I am not a financial advisor and all articles are my opinion. You should do your own due diligence and consider talking to a financial professional before investing.