Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, WooCommerce and soon Tumblr, has closed a $300 million funding round at a $3 billion post-money valuation. The Series D round has a single investor, Salesforce Ventures.
Founding rounds are something special for Automattic . While the company has been around for nearly 15 years, it hasn’t raised a ton of money. It closed a $160 million Series C round back in 2014 and raised little money before that.
Automattic and the WordPress open source project have a shared history. Many people are already familiar with WordPress, the most popular content management system on the planet. The company contributes to the open source project and also runs some of the most popular services on top of that project, such as WordPress.com and the Jetpack plugin, WordPress.com VIP (which TechCrunch uses) and WooCommerce.
This freemium business model with an open source philosophy at its core has been working well for the company. In 2014, Automattic had between 200 and 300 employees. The company will have close to 1,200 employees when the Tumblr acquisition closes.
Back in 2014, 22% of the world’s top 10 million …read more
Source:: TechCrunch – Startups
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