Automattic Inc. is an American global

distributed company A distributed company, remote company, or remote-first company is a company where all employees are physically distributed and engage in remote work. See also * Distributed workforce * List of remote companies The following is a list of remote ...

which was founded in August 2005 and is most notable for WordPress.com (a

freemium Freemium, a portmanteau of the words "free" and "premium," is a pricing strategy by which a basic product or service is provided free of charge, but money (a premium) is charged for additional features, services, or virtual (online) or physical ...

blogging service), as well as its contributions to

WordPress WordPress (WP or WordPress.org) is a free and open-source software, free and open-source content management system (CMS) written in PHP, hypertext preprocessor language and paired with a MySQL or MariaDB database with supported secure hypert ...

(an

open source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open-source model is a decentralized sof ...

blogging software). The company's name is a play on founder

Matt Mullenweg Matthew Charles Mullenweg (born January 11, 1984) is an American entrepreneur and web developer living in Houston. He is known for developing the free and open-source web software WordPress, now managed by The WordPress Foundation. After droppin ...

's first name and automatic. Automattic raised US$846 million in six funding rounds. The last round of US$288 million was closed in February 2021. A subsequent private stock buyback valued the company at US$7.5 billion. The company had 1,930 employees as of March 2022. Its

remote work Remote work, also called work from home (WFH), work from anywhere, telework, remote job, mobile work, and distance work is an employment arrangement in which employees do not commute to a central place of work, such as an office building, w ...

ing 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''. CEO Matt Mullenweg allows company employees to work from wherever they want, whenever they want.

History

On January 11, 2006, it was announced that Toni Schneider would be leaving Yahoo! to become

CEO A chief executive officer (CEO), also known as a central executive officer (CEO), chief administrator officer (CAO) or just chief executive (CE), is one of a number of corporate executives charged with the management of an organization especiall ...

of Automattic. He was previously CEO of

Oddpost Oddpost was a pay-for webmail service, in 2002, that pioneered the use of JavaScript to mimic a desktop mail application, the first notable foray into using Ajax methodologies for webmail. Ajax techniques minimized the amount of data sent during an ...

before it was acquired by

Yahoo! Yahoo! (, styled yahoo''!'' in its logo) is an American web services provider. It is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California and operated by the namesake company Yahoo! Inc. (2017–present), Yahoo Inc., which is 90% owned by investment funds ma ...

, where he had continued as a senior executive. In April 2006 Automattic's Regulation D filing showed it had raised approximately $1.1 million in funding, which Mullenweg addressed in his blog. Investors were Polaris Ventures, True Ventures, Radar Partners. On 18 October 2007, Automattic acquired

Gravatar Gravatar (a portmanteau of ''globally recognized avatar'') is a service for providing globally unique avatars and was created by Tom Preston-Werner. Since 2007, it has been owned by Automattic, having integrated it into their WordPress.com bloggi ...

. On September 23, 2008, Automattic announced acquiring IntenseDebate. Two months later, on November 15, 2008, Automattic acquired PollDaddy. Automattic Inc

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 product WooCommerce. On November 21, 2016, Automattic, via a subsidiary company (Knock Knock, WHOIS There) managed the launch and later development of the

.blog The domain name .blog is a generic top level domain (gTLD) in the Domain Name System of the Internet. Added in 2016, it is intended to be used for blogs. Anyone can sign up for a dot blog domain name at the regular available prices. People can ...

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 May 21, 2019, Automattic acquired Prospress, which provided a number of popular WooCommerce extensions and tools. On August 12, 2019, Automattic acquired

Tumblr Tumblr (stylized as tumblr; pronounced "tumbler") is an American microblogging and social networking website founded by David Karp in 2007 and currently owned by Automattic. The service allows users to post multimedia and other content to a ...

from

Verizon Media Verizon Communications Inc., commonly known as Verizon, is an American multinational telecommunications conglomerate and a corporate component of the Dow Jones Industrial Average. The company is headquartered at 1095 Avenue of the Americas in ...

. On August 16, 2019, Automattic acquired Zero BS CRM and rebranded it a year later to Jetpack CRM. 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 $3 billion. On February 8, 2021, Automattic acquired content analytics platform parse.ly for WPVIP, Founder Matt Mullenweg announced on his blog. On June 14, 2021, Automattic acquired journaling app Day One. On July 16, 2021, Automattic acquired the podcasts app Pocket Casts.

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 * bbPress – forum software * blo.gs –

RSS RSS ( RDF Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication) is a web feed that allows users and applications to access updates to websites in a standardized, computer-readable format. Subscribing to RSS feeds can allow a user to keep track of many di ...

feed aggregator * BuddyPress – social networking plugin suite * Cloudup – file sharing application * Crowdsignal (formerly Polldaddy) – polls and survey tools * GlotPress – collaborative translation tool *

– globally recognized avatars * HappyTools - resource planning software * IntenseDebate – 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 - WordPress plugin providing a range of basic services (backup, speed, stats, etc.) * Longreads – original reporting and journalism aggregator * Mongoose ODM – mongodb object modeling for node.js * Pocket Casts – app for listening to podcasts on IOS and Android * Poster – blogging app for IOS * Ping-O-Matic – pinging service * Simplenote – note-taking and sync service acquired by Automattic in 2013 and later

open-source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open-source model is a decentralized sof ...

d * Scroll Kit – code-free web design tool *

- Microblogging platform * VaultPress – backup and security service for WordPress sites * VideoPress – hosted HD video for WordPress sites * WooCommerce – eCommerce plugin for WordPress with a marketplace for extensions * WPVIP – Enterprise WordPress hosting, support, and consulting

References

External links

* * {{Authority control 2005 establishments in California American companies established in 2005 Companies based in San Francisco Free software companies Privately held companies based in California Remote companies Software companies based in the San Francisco Bay Area Software companies established in 2005 Software companies of the United States WordPress