Automattic Inc. is an American global distributed company which was founded in August 2005 and is most notable for WordPress.com, as well as its contributions to WordPress. The company's name is a play on its founder's first name, Matt. Automattic raised US$617.3 million in six funding rounds. In the last round, in September 2019, the company was valued at US$3 billion. The company had 1,184 employees as of May 2020. Its remote working culture was the topic of a participative journalism project by Scott Berkun, resulting in the 2013 book The Year Without Pants: WordPress.com and the Future of Work.
History
On January 11, 2006, it was announced that Toni Schneider would be leaving Yahoo! to become CEO of Automattic. He was previously CEO of Oddpost before it was acquired by Yahoo!, where he had continued as a senior executive. In April 2006, it was revealed, through a Regulation D filing, that Automattic raised approximately $1.1 million in funding, which Mullenweg addressed in his blog. Investors were Polaris Ventures, True Ventures, Radar Partners, and CNET. On September 23, 2008, Automattic announced acquiring IntenseDebate. Two months later, on November 15, 2008, Automattic acquired PollDaddy. On September 9, 2010, Automattic gave the WordPress trademark and control over bbPress and BuddyPress to the WordPress Foundation. On April 4, 2014, Automattic acquired Longreads. On May 19, 2015, Automattic announced the acquisition of WooThemes, including their flagship productWooCommerce. On November 21, 2016, Automattic, via a subsidiary company managed the launch and later development of the.blog gTLD, becoming domain registrars. In 2017, Automattic announced that it would close its San Francisco office, which had served as an optional co-working space for its employees alongside similar spaces near Portland, Maine and in Cape Town, South Africa. On June 21, 2018, Automattic acquired Atavist and its magazine. On August 12, 2019, Automattic acquired Tumblr from Verizon Media. On September 19, 2019 Automattic announced a Series D funding round of $300 million from Salesforce, bringing the post-money valuation of the company to $3B.
Projects
Other projects include:
After the Deadline – online proofreading tool now built into WordPress.com and Jetpack
Atavist – multimedia publishing platform
Akismet – anti-comment spam system capable of integration with many blogging platforms and forums
IntenseDebate – a blog comment hosting service that was launched as a private beta in January 2007 by Co-Founders Jon Fox, Isaac Keyet, and Josh Morgan, and launched as an open beta on October 30, 2007. On September 23, 2008, Automattic announced its acquisition of IntenseDebate's properties, and returned to private beta until November of that year. In 2007, IntenseDebate was selected to be part of the first class of Techstars, a Boulder, Colorado based startup accelerator.
Jetpack - a WordPress plugin providing a range of basic services.
Longreads – original reporting and journalism aggregator
Mongoose ODM – elegant mongodb object modeling for node.js
Poster – A blogging app for IOS
Ping-O-Matic – pinging service
Simplenote – note-taking and sync service acquired by Automattic in 2013 and later open-sourced.
