I don't understand, $600M? Is anyone using this browser?

BCNY is such a weird company. They started out as a "Hey, browsers are a bit crap, let's fix it" and they made Arc. Arc was fantastic. Used it daily on my Mac. They were doing cool stuff overall.

And then as soon as AI became more popularised, Josh (the CEO) went complete "tech bro" with it and started shoving AI in Arc (Arc Max) and then other problems with the browser started appearing, and the updates were few and far in between. There were promises to fix it, but they never materialised.

And then they made Dia. Dia could have been an extension/add-on for browsers.

$600M+ for BCNY is wild, though. Atlassian obviously has money to burn...

That can't be good. But I guess it was inevitable. It never seemed like Arc had a sustainable business model.

It was obvious from the get-go that their ChatGPT integration was a money pit that would eventually need to be monetized, and...I just don't see end users paying money for it. They've been giving it away for free hoping to get people hooked, I guess, but I know what the ChatGPT API costs and it's never going to be viable. If they built a local-only backend then maybe. I mean, at least then they wouldn't have costs that scale with usage.

For Atlassian, though? Maybe. Their enterprise customers are already paying out the nose. Usage-based pricing is a much easier sell. And they're entrenched deeply enough to enshittify successfully.

Oh. Arc and Dia.