Toni Schneider, the CEO of Automattic (Wordpress.com, Wordpress.org, etc.), gave more details on the funding that founder Matt Mullenweg wrote about yesterday on his blog.
No word on the size of the round, but Toni lists the investors: Polaris Ventures (Mike Hirshland), Blacksmith Capital (Phil Black, now at True Ventures), Radar Partners (Doug Mackenzie), and CNET (Shelby Bonnie).
Congratulations to the Automattic team. We run nothing but Wordpress blogging software on all of the TechCrunch blogs (list in left sidebar), and we named it a “company we couldn’t live without” a few months ago.
Any chance contributors get a piece of the cake?
That is awesome! Gratz to Matt and his company. We just posted our creative funding idea.
I was a MovableType user from 2001 to the present (with some client sites which don’t want to switch). I tried Wordpress.com for a sideproject, and later switched over several blogs and sites to WordPress. It is amazing software! Frankly, it leaves MovableType in the dust, in my opinion. Not that MovableType is bad, it’s fine, but WordPress is in my opinion on another level.
Honestly, this is a great company. There have been lots of web2.0 companies that have lots of hype but very little adoption. These folks did it all… now if they can make some money and ensure their survival, we’ll all be happy.
Maybe they’ll follow MT into the business space. WordpressMU basically offers a business ready solution without sharing.
Congrats to them! Interested to see what they do with the money.
Read this on Matt’s blog – good news for a really cool company. WP is way better than most others and I hope they conitnue to innovate and bring us more tools like WP, WP.com and Akismet (though I’d love to see a way to un-block users/IPs that Akismet mistakenly marks as spam)
I wonder how they will make money exactly though. Will they go in the direction of Six Apart and create supported versions or Pro versions of WordPress or what?
Anyone got any ideas?