Automattic, the parent company of the popular WordPress software, raises $300M Series D investment from Salesforce Ventures
Nickie Louise
Posted On September 19, 2019
Automattic Inc., the parent company of the popular web publishing and ecommerce platforms WordPress.com, WooCommerce, Jetpack, and enterprise WordPress VIP, has raised $300M in a Series D investment round to fuel the company’s growth.
The fresh capital infusion will enable the company to scale its businesses and continue its investment in the growing WordPress ecosystem. The investment came from Salesforce Ventures, who joins Insight, Tiger Global, and True Ventures as an investor. Since inception in 2005, Automattic has raised a total of $617.3M in funding over 10 rounds.
Founded in 2005 by Matt Mullenweg, the San Francisco-based Automattic is the company behind WordPress.com and WordPress.com VIP, the cloud version of WordPress. Automattic hosts and supports all WordPress.com sites ensuring that there is continuous and strategic development of the software available to its users.
Its popular WordPress content management software (CMS) is used by more than 60 million websites,[6] including 33.6% of the top 10 million websites as of April 2019. WordPress is the most popular website management system in use.
Commenting on the funding, Matt Mullenweg, co-founder of WordPress and CEO of Automattic, said the funding will help fuel the company’s growth, allowing Automattic to scale its businesses and continue its investment in the growing WordPress ecosystem. WordPress, to which Automattic is a major contributor, now powers more than 34 percent of all sites on the web.
“The investment and partnership with Salesforce represents a tremendous vote of confidence in Automattic’s business and the future of the open web,” Mullenweg said.
“Through Salesforce’s investment and partnership with Automattic we look forward to deepening our commitment to WordPress and the open web,” said Bret Taylor, President and Chief Product Officer of Salesforce.
Automattic is a fully distributed company, with no central office and more than 900 employees working from 71 countries.
