Mikel Amigot | IBL News
Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, WooCommerce, the Jetpack plugin and soon Tumblr, announced on Thursday that it closed a $300 million funding round in Series D from Salesforce Ventures. The investment puts Automattic’s valuation at $3 billion post-funding.
Today WordPress powers more than 34% of all sites on the web, claims Automattic CEO and WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg [in the picture].
The company will have close to 1,200 employees when the Tumblr acquisition closes. In August, Automattic purchased Tumblr from Verizon for $3 million, a fraction of what it was worth when Yahoo bought it for $1.1 billion in 2013. Tumblr is seen as complementary to WordPress.com; therefore, no major changes are planned.
The freemium business model with an open-source philosophy at its core has been working very well for Automattic Inc.
WordPress, as a free open-source software platform, is owned by a non-profit group called The WordPress Foundation, while the popular domain WordPress.com is privately held.
Automattic makes most of its money by selling subscriptions to software services related to the WordPress platform, like WooCommerce, an open-source e-commerce plugin for WordPress; Jetpack, a customization and security plugin for WordPress; and enterprise WordPress for businesses, such as WordPress.com VIP. It also gets revenues by selling advertising against some of the free blogs that users create on WordPress.com.
