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Company type | Private |
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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 | 1,482 (2025 [1] ) |
ASN | 2635 |
Website | automattic.com |
Automattic Inc. is an American global distributed company most notable for WordPress.com and its contributions to the WordPress system. The company was founded in 2005. [2]
Automattic's brands and products include WordPress.com, Akismet, Gravatar, BuddyPress, [3] Simplenote, WooCommerce, [4] Atavist, [5] Tumblr, [6] Parse.ly, [7] Day One, [8] Pocket Casts, [9] and Beeper. [10]
Matt Mullenweg co-founded the open-source blogging platform WordPress in 2003. Two years later, he founded Automattic to monetize the platform. [11]
Initially the company developed commercial products related to WordPress, including WordPress.com for WordPress-managed hosting and the spam filtering service Akismet. [12] Toni Schneider, a former executive at Yahoo, became chief executive officer (CEO) in 2006. [12] [13] Automattic acquired Gravatar in 2007, then IntenseDebate and PollDaddy in 2008. [14] [15]
Automattic transferred the WordPress source code and trademarks to the WordPress Foundation in 2010 and it also acquired the prompt generator Plinky. [16] [17] In 2011, the company created Jetpack, a WordPress extension. [15]
Automattic's 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. [18]
On November 21, 2016, Automattic managed the launch and development of the .blog gTLD. [19]
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. [20]
In August 2019, Automattic closed a deal with Verizon Media to acquire Tumblr. [21] 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. [22]
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. [23]
In February 2024, it was reported that the company would begin selling user data from Tumblr and WordPress.com to Midjourney and OpenAI. [24]
On April 2, 2025, the company announced a restructuring that resulted in the layoff of 16% of its workforce, or 281 positions. [25]
Towards the end of September 2024, Automattic was involved in a controversy with WP Engine, in which Automattic claimed WP Engine used the WordPress trademark in a way that confused consumers. One of the main claims made is that WP Engine does not pay trademark royalties to the WordPress Foundation. [26] Over 8 percent of Automattic's staff resigned after CEO Matt Mullenweg offered $30,000 or six months' salary as severance to those who disagreed with his stance. [27] The next month, Mullenweg made another offer, this time of nine months' salary. [28]
As of December 2024 [update] , Automattic's board consisted of the following directors: [29]
Media related to Automattic at Wikimedia Commons