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Atlassian Rises Nearly 30 Percent in $440 Million Nasdaq Trading Debut

Shares of the company behind HipChat popped on the company’s debut.

Via Accel / Twitter

Shares of collaboration software company Atlassian ended its first day of trading up by more than 32 percent closing after $27.78 a share on the the Nasdaq and briefly traded as high as $28.50.

Shares of the Australia-founded company best known for its HipChat interoffice chat service and Jira, its project-tracking application for software developers, priced at $21 a share Wednesday, raising $440 million, making it the last major tech IPO of the year.

Valued at north of $4 billion, Atlassian is already a unicorn four times over. And while “unicorn” usually describes something seemingly rare — a tech startup worth $1 billion or more — Atlassian is even rarer than that. Filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission show that it posted a profit in its 2015 fiscal year ended June 30. The closing price left Atlassian with a market valuation of nearly $5.8 billion.

Atlassian finished the year with $320 million in revenue, more than half of which came from subscriptions. Net profit for the year was $6.8 million, or four cents a share. And in its most recent quarter, ended Sept. 30, it posted a three-cent profit on sales of $102 million, which grew about 50 percent year on year.

All in, the company says its software has five million individual users and that its products are in use at 51,000 companies that pay to use it. HipChat, a tool it acquired in 2012, competes in a crowded marketplace for software aimed at workplace communication and collaboration. It’s up against outfits like Slack, Cisco’s Spark and Microsoft’s Yammer, among numerous others.

Atlassian president Jay Simons said in an interview with Re/code that it has a strong competitive stance against Slack and Cisco and the others because its numerous products address a wider range of workplace needs. “There are a lot of companies that do one part of what we do, and that’s communication, but we’ve been at this for 13 years. Communication is only one part of teamwork,” he said. “We uniquely understand the needs of teams in the workplace. … We want to do for teamwork what Microsoft did for personal productivity.”

Atlassian’s one big venture capital investor is Accel Partners, which owns a stake amounting to about 12.5 percent which it acquired in secondary sales. Founders Michael Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar control more than 37 percent each, adding up to a combined 87 percent among those three.

Here’s a Google Finance chart showing Atlassian’s first day of trading.

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

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