Automattic is a web development & blogware company – August 2005. Attributing much of its success to its popular blog platform WordPress.com. An adaptation of the popular open source wordpress project
Key People
- Matt Mullenweg, founder of Automattic, founding developer of WordPress – Matt writes a popular blog ma.tt, and continues to be the primary developer and spokesman for the company. Former OddPost CEO
- Toni Schneider, CEO of Automatic – In addition to Automattic, Toni is also a Venture Partner at True Ventures. Toni was a co-founder of Sphere (acquired by AOL)
- Ryan Boren, Lead developer of WordPress and a co-conspirator at Automattic.
In addition to having 4 self-produced products (WordPress.com, WordPress.org, Akismet.com and bbPress)
Automattic Products
- Wordpess.com – 2.2 million blogs that it hosts, with 482 million page views overall (Jan 2008)
- Akismet – An anti-comment spam system capable of integration with many blogging platforms and forums.
- WordPress MU – A multi-blog community system built on WordPress.
They also contribute to a number of non-profit and Open Source projects, here are a few:
- bbPress – Forum Software
- BuddyPress – Social Networking Plugin Suite
- WordPress.org
- Ping-O-Matic - is a mechanism by which blogs notify external servers that content has been updated
Background
Matt Mullenweg, wrote in December 2005 that the company wasn’t seeking funding. However in March 2006. They obtained investors ;Polaris Ventures, Blacksmith Capital, Radar Partners, and CNET.
Automattic began raising a $1.25 million round Dec 2005 and had sold $1.1 million in series A stocksJanuary 2008 – It was mentioned in a discussion by Matt, that Automattic had raised a whopping $29.5 million in a Series B Round of funding, including a strategic investment from The New York Times Co. Previous investors True Ventures, Polaris Ventures, and Radar Ventures also invested in this round.
Acquired
- Automattic, acquired blog avatar provider Gravatar. October 2007 – Gravatar was facing “classic problems of scale” that Automattic was capable of handling.
- On September 23 2008, Automattic announces acquiring IntenseDebate.
- Two months later, on November 15th, Automattic acquired PollDaddy – polls and survey
Services
There a big demand for professional services around Automattics projects
- BraveNewCode – They are active in the WordPress community contributing plugins like WPtouch and WordTwit, they host WordCamp events & work with others to try and make our favourite open-source publishing tool even better.
- Instinct (NZ) – Aside from our two core products (WP e-Commerce & Game Creator); WordPress Plugin development is there bread and butter.
- Incsub – They are a web development firm specializing in blog and social networks built around WordPress MultiUser. They are the founders, developers and operators of one of the largest blog sites on the web (Edublogs) and central hub for community and premium WordPress MU functionality (WPMU DEV)
- The Yellow Llama (South Africa): There main skillset lies in the development, tweaking, hybridizing and creation of custom WordPress websites. Since around 2005, they have been working with WordPress as a blogging engine and more specifically, a highly customizable Content Management System.
