Peter Lenke, head of Atlassian Ventures, is one of the 100 leading corporate venturing professionals in our 2025 Powerlist.
Peter Lenke is head of Atlassian Ventures, the enterprise software provider’s corporate venture unit, leading a lean team focused on driving strong investment returns in emerging symbiotic areas.
“At Atlassian Ventures, we have 55 active companies and have deployed more than $200m, thematically focused on driving value to our portfolio companies.”
Atlassian Ventures started 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.
“At Atlassian Ventures, we have 55 active companies and have deployed more than $200m, thematically focused on driving value to our portfolio companies,” says Lenke.
Lenke came 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 gained experience as an associate at Silicon Valley Bank’s VC fund, SVB Capital, earlier in his career and later as a manager of corporate development at commerce adtech firm Criteo.
One of Atlassian Ventures’ most significant success stories so far is the investment in website design tool Figma. Atlassian invested in Figma after it had already scaled and was able to collaborate quickly on product integration and marketing. “The uniqueness and the success for me is the relationship with a company that is multi-faceted and, again, we were able to invest from an equity standpoint, in a really exciting and compelling business, in a symbiotic space with a market-leading company,” says Lenke.
In addition to more mature businesses, Atlassian Ventures also focuses on early-stage investments, seed through series B. The unit’s current investment focus is on AI’s impact on efficiency, as people look into how they can change workflows from code to document transcription or writing, “That is a theme we are continuing to look into and explore.”
The team has also been looking at compliance, data privacy and security. “These are interesting spaces, including large language model work, how data is flowing across SaaS apps, how cloud and on-premises environments are changing and how data flows to users across all of these systems,” says Lenke. “We have made some investments in this space, too, and it is one we will continue to monitor.”
The Global Corporate Venturing Powerlist represents the 100 individuals spearheading the future of the corporate venturing industry.
These individuals excel in terms of their venturing approach and structure, number and quality of portfolio companies and in their contributions to the corporate venturing profession.
