Trello today announced that it is launching operations in Japan next year as part of its overall global growth strategy.
When Atlassian bought Trello earlier this year, one of the motivations for the sale was that Trello thought the larger company could help it reach more users. It’s no surprise then that Trello is now leveraging Atlassian’s existing presence in Japan to grow its presence there. Trello co-founder Michael Pryor made the announcement at TechCrunch Tokyo earlier today.
In addition to opening an office and providing localized go-to-market and support, the company is also partnering with local companies like knowledge-sharing platform Qiita and group chat tool ChatWork to integrate its tools into its service.
The plan is to start the service’s operations in Japan in February 2018. Atlassian already has an office in Yokohama to support local users of its other tools and the Trello team will piggyback on this existing infrastructure.
“Launching Trello in Japan has been a goal of ours for years, and we’re confident that the market will embrace Trello‘s Kanban-style tool, especially as it continues to go through its tremendous work-style transformation,” said Michael Pryor, co-founder and head of Trello. “With Atlassian’s support in Japan, we are excited to finally be able to support a long-term strategy and provide users with support in local language.”
It’s worth noting that Trello already launched support for Japanese a few years ago and the service surely has plenty of users in the country already — Trello’s kanban-style boards, after all, are a Japanese invention.