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January 22, 2008

Automattic Lands Massive $29.5M for WordPress, Other Products

Mark Hendrickson

23 comments »

As we speculated, Automattic, provider of the WordPress open-source blogging software and spam filter Akismet, has raised $29.5M in a Series B round of financing led by Polaris Ventures (which put in $20 million of the $29.5 million). Other participants in the round include The New York Times, True Ventures, and Radar Ventures.

The large injection of capital will not only go towards the development of Akismet and WordPress (the downloadable software) but the development of Wordpress.com (its hosted blogging platform), Gravatar (its avatar offering), and BBPress (an upcoming hosted bulletin board product) as well.

Wordpress.com recently boosted its storage cap to 3GB, far surpassing its competitors Blogger and TypePad. WordPress was honored twice at this past week’s Crunchies in the categories of “Most Likely to Succeed” and “Best CEO”.

Last October, Automattic was rumored to have turned down a $200M acquisition offer. The question is: how much did the founders take off the table with this round?

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 22nd, 2008 at 8:43 pm and is filed under Company & Product Profiles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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    January 23rd, 2008 at 12:22 pm

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Comments

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  1. Alex Williams

    January 22nd, 2008 at 8:55 pm

    Wordpress is pulling way ahead as the dominant blog platform. This funding just helps seal the deal.

    But the medium is still showing some handsome offspring so by no means is the game over. I think of Tumblr, the wonderful platform developed by Davidville. It’s a lifestream tool while Wordpress is the CMS for more heavyweight blogging. Heh. I never thought I would call Wordpress a heavyweight.

    Congrats to Automattic and the Wordpress crew!

  2. David Krug

    January 22nd, 2008 at 8:55 pm

    It’s great news for the entire blogging community.

  3. Dan Schawbel

    January 22nd, 2008 at 9:03 pm

    This is good news for anyone on the wordpress platform like myself.

  4. Chris

    January 22nd, 2008 at 9:06 pm

    I am not a blogger, nor do I use their software. However, I am in the industry and can truly appreciate a great group of people working hard to produce great things that make people happy. Automattic is that kind of group.

    Congrats to your team and I am excited to see whats coming next.

  5. yongfook

    January 22nd, 2008 at 9:39 pm

    Blog Plug!! 10 Reasons Why I DITCHED Wordpress….
    http://www.yongfook.com/post/v.....-wordpress

  6. david

    January 22nd, 2008 at 10:08 pm

    As an existing Wordpress user (since 2.0!) I gotta give the WP guys a nice congrats on raising such a monster B round, very impressive and no doubt well deserved. They really are good guys doing good work.

  7. Baher

    January 22nd, 2008 at 10:09 pm

    This huge amount of money will definitely be used for more than the reported plans, with 2 million blogs, Automattic is well positioned to get into the online advertising business, if only for the sake of their platform.

    And as Mark Evans said, it makes sense also to compliment their offerings by acquiring a publishing tool.

    My post about it is here http://technozzle.com/?p=54

  8. Technicle

    January 22nd, 2008 at 10:31 pm

    Nice influx of capital…

    Time to offer betterments to the codebase..

    Btw what happened to http://www.buddypress.com, went blank-screen for a few days.. mightbe time for wordpress to pick up the idea (adding social networking functions to wordpress)..

  9. Dyde

    January 23rd, 2008 at 12:00 am

    I wonder how they’re going to pay that money back. I think the VC’s hope that someone else will go crazy and buy Wordpess thus landing them a nice profit.

    But who can that be? Google has blogger, Yahoo has whatever their service was called, MSN has spaces. Who else will cough up? Most likely, it would be IAC or Robert Murdoch, they like to buy businesses with no viable business model.

  10. B.Ackles

    January 23rd, 2008 at 12:02 am

    There are only a few companies I think would be fitting to buyout Automattic. The New York Times Co. is among the few…

    As a WordPress & NYtimes.com evangelist I think this was a great idea for both parties…

  11. Eric Nakagawa

    January 23rd, 2008 at 12:18 am

    I’m very happy to hear about such a sizeable capital investment. These guys produce a great tool that has helped us grow fast and without a huge investment.

    I enjoy the flexibility and hackability of wordpress codex and look forward to new festures and and even better platform!

  12. Blogsfeed

    January 23rd, 2008 at 1:07 am

    Turn wordpress into an open-source facebook.. add apps directory and general canvas.. and what not.. And follow on with a $2B (or $20B) IPO.. Don’t think, just do. The world will love you. 8-)

  13. Doug Stewart

    January 23rd, 2008 at 2:37 am

    bbPress is neither hosted nor non-available. You can download it and install it just like the WordPress.org version of WP.

    Now, if you’re saying that they’re going to make a bbpress.com similar to wordpress.com, well, that’s a different matter

    Hit bbPress.org to grab a copy today.

  14. Zuggu

    January 23rd, 2008 at 3:14 am

    It’s good to see money going in the good direction

  15. Keith

    January 23rd, 2008 at 4:12 am

    I agree with Blogsfeed, if WordPress can become CommunityPress and keep the same levels of usability and hackability it won’t be long before everyone drops Drupal and Joomla and heads their way.

    WordPress ftw

  16. stone

    January 23rd, 2008 at 4:32 am

    Good news on the funding but bad news on the acquisition front. They clearly tried to “shop” the company and clearly couldn’t find a buyer willing to pay their price. Not a good endorsement.

  17. Peter

    January 23rd, 2008 at 4:54 am

    Congrats to Automattic, it’s well deserved considering the excellent products they’ve produced by overseeing WordPress development and services like WordPress.com and Akismet. Their stats-tracking service is also convenient for blogs.

    Let’s hope that this means continued improvement for WordPress for a while.

  18. Fabian Schonholz

    January 23rd, 2008 at 5:52 am

    Congrats to the team!!

  19. Adam Sharp

    January 23rd, 2008 at 1:01 pm

    Seems like potential lots of ways to get revenue:

    #1 - Expand wordpress.com Premium services - upgraded stats, assistance monetizing sites, etc
    #2 - License akismet and other technologies to sites/CMSs/Blog platforms
    #3 - Refer users to services like Adsense, CJ.com, GoDaddy, Adwords, etc

    Also, $30 million doesn’t seem too large considering FunnyorDie just raised $15 million. Wordpress has millions of users and some solid software/tech. Paying for all that hosting and those developers ain’t cheap.

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