Automattic

Market position

WordPress, the open-source software behind Automattic, was estimated in 2021 to power roughly 42% of all websites on the internet, and the company states its founding product powers over 40% of all websites. In 2021 WordPress powered 28 million websites, or 40 percent of all websites using a content management system. WooCommerce, acquired in 2015, was believed to run more than a quarter of all online storefronts. Automattic reached a $7.5 billion valuation in 2021, was described as becoming a unicorn in 2014, and was included in the 2024 Forbes Cloud 100 list.

Automattic builds a commercial business on top of volunteer-run open-source infrastructure rather than a closed platform, giving away its most successful product for free and releasing most of its work under the GPL; it transferred the WordPress source code and trademarks to the WordPress Foundation in 2010. It has been remote-first and asynchronous since its 2005 founding, more than a decade before the pandemic normalized distributed work, with employees choosing where and when they work and roughly 70% of projects tracked on P2-themed WordPress.com blogs. Its hiring process includes a paid trial project. The company remains privately held and independent, having neither gone public nor been acquired.

Technology

Automattic's products are built on the open-source WordPress content management system, with the vast majority of the company's work released under the GPL. The 2015 relaunch of hosted WordPress.com replaced PHP with JavaScript and simplified the administrative design, and the company also shipped WordPress desktop and mobile applications including Mac, iOS and Android. Other technology includes the Akismet spam-filtering service, the Jetpack plugin for security, growth and speed, the Jetpack AI Assistant launched in 2023, the P2 blog-style asynchronous collaboration platform, and Newspack, a publishing platform for local news organizations. The company operates ASN 2635.

Go-to-market

Automattic distributes free and open-source software widely — WordPress.org, plugins such as WooCommerce and Jetpack, and free WordPress.com sites — and upsells premium services, hosting plans and enterprise offerings. It supports community-driven channels including WordCamps, BuddyPress, bbPress and the Five for the Future contribution program, makes products freely available in numerous languages, offers customer support in multiple languages, and ensures products are accessible across different bandwidths and devices. Growth has also come through frequent acquisitions of adjacent products and audiences.

Individuals, bloggers, creators and publishers using WordPress.com, Tumblr, Day One, Pocket Casts and Longreads; merchants selling online via WooCommerce; local news organizations via Newspack; and enterprises through WordPress VIP, whose customers include Meta, Salesforce and Slack. Akismet is free for personal users with low comment volumes and paid for enterprise users.

Geography

Headquartered in San Francisco, California, Automattic is a fully distributed company with 1,447 employees working from 81 countries and speaking 107 languages according to its press fact sheet; other company pages cite 1,431 Automatticians in 83 countries speaking 108 languages. It maintains drop-in collaboration spaces in NoHo, New York City and the Mission district of San Francisco, and previously operated optional co-working spaces in San Francisco, near Portland, Maine, and in Cape Town, South Africa, which it announced it would close in 2017. Teams gather at in-person meetups in locations worldwide, and employees are expected to travel three to four weeks per year.

History

Founded in 2005 to monetize WordPress, Automattic launched WordPress.com to a limited audience via auctioned "golden tickets" and built early revenue on Akismet. Toni Schneider, a former Yahoo executive, became CEO in 2006 and led the company for roughly eight years while Automattic operated largely bootstrapped on about $11 million of outside capital. Acquisitions followed steadily: Gravatar (2007), IntenseDebate and PollDaddy (2008), Plinky (2010), Lean Domain Search and CloudUp (2013), Longreads (2014), WooCommerce (2015), Atavist Magazine (2018), Tumblr (2019), Day One, Frontity and Pocket Casts (2021), Parse.ly (2022, its largest deal at the time), Texts (2023), and Beeper, Harper and WPAI (2024). The company created the Jetpack extension in 2011, transferred the WordPress source code and trademarks to the WordPress Foundation in 2010, raised $160 million in 2014 when Mullenweg became CEO, relaunched WordPress.com on JavaScript in 2015, managed the launch of the .blog gTLD in 2016, closed its San Francisco co-working office in 2017, raised $300 million in 2019 at a $3 billion valuation, partnered with Google on Newspack in 2019, launched P2 in 2020, reached a $7.5 billion valuation in 2021, and launched the Jetpack AI Assistant in 2023. In April 2025 it announced a restructuring cutting 16% of its workforce.

Risks & controversies

In September 2024 Automattic entered a public dispute and litigation with WP Engine, claiming WP Engine used the WordPress trademark in a way that confused consumers and did not pay trademark royalties to the WordPress Foundation; more than 8% of Automattic's staff resigned after CEO Matt Mullenweg offered $30,000 or six months' salary as severance to employees who disagreed with his stance, an offer later increased to nine months' salary. In February 2024 it was reported that the company would begin selling user data from Tumblr and WordPress.com to Midjourney and OpenAI. On April 2, 2025 the company laid off 16% of its workforce (281 positions) in a restructuring. Early in its history, its reliance on volunteer-run open-source infrastructure and its fully remote workforce gave many investors pause.