Automattic

Automattic develops software for publishing, online commerce and messaging. Its founding product is WordPress.com, a hosted service for building websites and blogs on WordPress. The company also maintains WooCommerce, an open-source ecommerce platform for WordPress, Jetpack for site security, backups and performance, and WordPress VIP, an enterprise content platform.

The company was founded in 2005 by Matt Mullenweg, who serves as chief executive, and it is based in San Francisco while operating as a distributed organisation. Its about page states that there are 1,414 staff spread across nearly every corner of the globe speaking 107 languages, and it says WordPress software runs on more than 40% of all websites. Customers range from individual bloggers to large publishers and brands.

Automattic's portfolio also includes Tumblr, which it bought from Verizon in August 2019, as well as Gravatar, Akismet, Day One, Pocket Casts, Simplenote, Parse.ly and Beeper. In 2019 the company raised $300 million in a round led by Salesforce Ventures at a $3 billion valuation, and it states that it earns about half a billion US dollars in annual revenue while releasing most of its work under open-source licences.