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Company type | Private |
---|---|
Industry |
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Founded | 2005 | , in the United States
Founder | Matt Mullenweg |
Headquarters | San Francisco, California, US |
Key people | Matt Mullenweg (CEO, president) |
Products | |
Number of employees | 1,934 (January 2024) [1] |
ASN | 2635 |
Website | automattic.com |
Automattic Inc. is an American global distributed company which was founded in August 2005 and is most notable for WordPress.com (a freemium blogging service), as well as its contributions to WordPress (an open source blogging software). The company's name is a play on founder Matt Mullenweg's first name and the word "automatic". [2]
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. [3] [4]
In April 2006, Automattic's Regulation D filing showed it had raised approximately $1.1 million in funding, [5] which Mullenweg addressed in his blog. Investors were Polaris Ventures, True Ventures, and Radar Partners. [2]
On September 9, 2010, Automattic gave the WordPress trademark and control over bbPress and BuddyPress to the WordPress Foundation. [6]
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. [7]
On November 21, 2016, Automattic, via a subsidiary company (Knock Knock, WHOIS There) managed the launch and later development of the .blog gTLD, thus becoming a domain registrar. [8]
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. [9]
In August 2019, Automattic closed a deal with Verizon Media to acquire Tumblr. [10] Mullenweg stated that he saw Tumblr as an "on-ramp" for WordPress adoption. [11]
In September of the same year, Automattic announced a Series D funding round of $300 million from Salesforce, increasing its valuation to US$3 billion. [12]
Ending in February 2021, Automattic brought in US$288 million from a primary funding round. Subsequently, the company participated in a stock buyback, with the company valued at US$7.5 billion. [13]
In February 2024, it was reported that the company would begin selling user data from Tumblr and WordPress.com to Midjourney and OpenAI. [14]
Some notable Automattic brands and products include:
WordPress is a web content management system. It was originally created as a tool to publish blogs but has evolved to support publishing other web content, including more traditional websites, mailing lists and Internet forum, media galleries, membership sites, learning management systems and online stores. Available as free and open-source software, WordPress is among the most popular content management systems – it was used by 43.1% of the top 10 million websites as of December 2023.
Matthew Charles Mullenweg is an American entrepreneur and web developer. He is known for developing WordPress and founding Automattic.
Gravatar 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 blogging platform.
Salesforce, Inc. is an American cloud-based software company headquartered in San Francisco, California. It provides customer relationship management (CRM) software and applications focused on sales, customer service, marketing automation, e-commerce, analytics, and application development.
WordPress.com is a web building platform for self-publishing that is popular for blogging and other works. It is owned and operated by Automattic, Inc. It is run on a modified version of the WordPress software. This website provides free blog hosting for registered users and is financially supported via paid upgrades, "VIP" services and advertising.
Akismet is a service that filters spam from comments, trackbacks, and contact form messages. The filter operates by combining information about spam captured on all participating sites and then using those spam rules to block future spam. Akismet is offered by Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com. Akismet was launched on October 25, 2005.
Seesmic was a suite of freeware web, mobile, and desktop applications which allowed users to simultaneously manage user accounts for multiple social networks, such as Facebook and Twitter.
Tumblr is a microblogging and social networking website founded by David Karp in 2007 and currently owned by American company Automattic. The service allows users to post multimedia and other content to a short-form blog.
Wix.com Ltd. is an Israeli software company, publicly listed in the US, that provides cloud-based web development services. It offers tools for creating HTML5 websites and mobile sites using online drag-and-drop editing. Along with its headquarters and other offices in Israel, Wix also has offices in Brazil, Canada, Germany, India, Ireland, Japan, Lithuania, Poland, the Netherlands, the United States, Ukraine, and Singapore.
BuddyPress is an open-source social networking software package owned by Automattic since 2008. It is a plugin that can be installed on WordPress to transform it into a social network platform. BuddyPress is designed to allow schools, companies, sports teams, or any other niche community to start their own social network or communication tool.
HubSpot, Inc. is an American developer and marketer of software products for inbound marketing, sales, and customer service. HubSpot was founded by Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah in 2006.
140 Proof is an advertising company that uses social data from many sources in targeting relevant ads based on consumers' interests as indicated by their social activity across networks.
WooCommerce is an open-source e-commerce plugin for WordPress. It is designed for small to large-sized online merchants using WordPress. Launched on September 27, 2011, the plugin quickly became popular for its simplicity to install and customize and for the market position of the base product as freeware. WooCommerce is developed and supported by Woo and includes contributions from a global community of developers.
Day One is a personal journaling app available for Android, macOS and iOS devices. Some features include: data syncing with multiple devices; end-to-end encryption, Markdown authoring of entries; location, weather, date, time, and other automatic metadata; quick entry menu bar ; and reminders.
Yahoo! Inc. is an American multinational technology company that focuses on media and online business. It is the second and current incarnation of the company, after Verizon Communications acquired the core assets of its predecessor and merged them with AOL in 2017. The resulting subsidiary entity was briefly called Oath Inc. In December 2018, Verizon announced it would write down the combined value of its purchases of AOL and Yahoo! by $4.6 billion, roughly half; the company would be renamed Verizon Media the following month in January 2019.
The fediverse is a collection of federated social networking services that can communicate with each other even if they are controlled independently. Users of different websites can send and receive status updates and multimedia files across the network. The term "fediverse" is a portmanteau of "federation" and "universe".
ActivityPub is an open, decentralized social networking protocol based on Pump.io's ActivityPump protocol. It provides a client/server API for creating, updating, and deleting content, as well as a federated server-to-server API for delivering notifications and content.
Beeper is an instant messaging service that enables using a variety of chat services and protocols all from the same application. Originally developed by Beeper Inc, it was acquired by Automattic in April 2024.
Media related to Automattic at Wikimedia Commons