Enterprise software producer Atlassian has appointed Peter Lenke head of strategic investment arm Atlassian Ventures, he revealed yesterday.
Lenke comes to the unit after more than six years overseeing venture capital and M&A deals at Twitter as director of corporate development and strategy. He had spent over two years as an associate at Silicon Valley Bank’s VC fund, SVB Capital, earlier in his career.
Atlassian Ventures was launched in the San Francisco Bay Area in late 2020 with a $50m fund and a brief to invest in enterprise collaboration tools that could be integrated with its parent company’s workflow collaboration platform and featured in its app marketplace.
Lenke succeeds Matt Sonefeldt, who was formally made head of Atlassian Ventures in early 2022, by which time the unit had invested a total of $110m, adding the likes of app security unicorn Snyk and open directory platform JumpCloud to an existing portfolio that included Zoom and Slack.
“We’ll continue investing in early stage and growth companies across the work management, agile/devops, and IT service management markets,” Lenke said in a LinkedIn post announcing the move. “Focusing on opportunities where we can leverage strong Atlassian integrations, create value for our mutual customers and target companies that can become the next big hit on the Atlassian Marketplace.”
Twitter’s investments during Lenke’s time at the company included Android operating system developer Cyanogen, online music streaming platform Soundcloud and Indian social network ShareChat.
Sonefeldt had been vice-president of investor relations and then strategy and business operations for Australia-based Atlassian prior to heading its corporate VC unit. He left in January to co-found Long-Term Value Advisors, which helps public companies with their investor relations work.
