Appfire Acquires SoftwarePlant to Disrupt PPM Market

BOSTON--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Appfire, a leading provider of apps that help teams solve modern challenges with digital solutions, today announced the acquisition of SoftwarePlant, developers of BigPicture, a Project Portfolio Management (PPM) tool that integrates with Jira. As part of the acquisition, SoftwarePlant’s founders Tomasz Kucharski and Michal Niwinski, and 165 team members will join Appfire, increasing the company’s global workforce to nearly 400 people.

Launched in 2015, SoftwarePlant develops advanced project portfolio management solutions used by more than three million people around the world. BigPicture provides an innovative approach to how data is aggregated and managed for multiple teams, supporting both bottom-up reporting and top-down planning — a significant advantage compared to the typical integration that other PPM vendors offer. With 26,000 global installs, the BigPicture suite creates a connection across teams, with data from multiple sources synchronized simultaneously within one product.

“The rapidly expanding PPM market is at the center of the digital transformation wave and ripe for disruption. SoftwarePlant’s team and technology combined with our experience scaling software businesses will allow us to offer a compelling alternative solution,” said Randall Ward, co-founder and CEO, Appfire. “Tom and Mike know this space intimately and share our exciting vision for BigPicture, including integrating many apps within our portfolio and expansion to other popular ecosystems. We look forward to helping operate SoftwarePlant’s growing business, while their founders continue to work toward what's next in the PPM space.”

“The typical project and portfolio management solution is a homogeneous solution,” Michal Niwinski, co-founder and CTO, SoftwarePlant shared. “If a company decides to go with another solution, everyone has to migrate to that solution. Instead of reinventing the wheel, we have a deep bi-directional integration with existing team management tools that’s helped this product scale very quickly.”

“As BigPicture’s customer base has grown, there’s also been more demand for new functionality and better performance, reliability, and security,” commented Tom Kucharski, co-founder and CEO, SoftwarePlant. “We felt that we could make improvements in sales and other areas with help from a strategic advisor to grow even further. We knew we needed a partner, and we were excited to find that Appfire’s team already shared our vision for the product and our values, in addition to the huge portfolio and market expertise they bring.”

Kirkland & Ellis LLP and Wardynski & Partners served as legal counsel to Appfire.

About Appfire

Appfire is an award-winning Atlassian Platinum Marketplace Partner and a global authority in the Atlassian ecosystem for more than 15 years. Appfire’s popular solutions help teams with Workflow and Automation, Business Intelligence (BI), Administrative Tools, Developer Tools, Product Portfolio Management, and Publishing. The company has the largest portfolio of apps on the Atlassian Marketplace with 170+ purpose-built products and over 185,000 active installations worldwide. Learn more at www.appfire.com.