It’s confirmed, Automattic has officially hit the billion dollar mark!
The company just raised $160 million in venture funding, placing its new value at $1.16 billion. A blog post by Matt Mullenweg reported that the financing round was led by Deven Parekh of Insight Ventures, with other investors including Chris Sacca, Endurance, Tiger, and Iconiq.
Mullenweg indicated that several other investors expressed a high-level of interest, but he focused on finding the best partners.
The new funding is further validation of Automattic’s future plans for growth. Mullenweg said:
This is obviously a lot of money, especially considering everything we’ve done so far has been built on only about $12M of outside capital over the past 8 years.
Plans for the new funding aim to facilitate their overall growth and expansion of Automattic as a company. Additionally, Mullenweg explained that Automattic will continue to invest their resources in making WordPress a better project, and to the overall mission of democratizing publishing.
A recent article by Fortune suggests that Automattic may use some of the new funds to fend off challenges from rivals like Squarespace and Medium.
Since Mullenweg stepped up as CEO in January, we’ve seen continuous growth from Automattic, including recent acquisition of Longreads and Scroll Kit. With the new funding, it’s likely that we can expect to see some more big moves from Automattic in the near future.
How do you think this news might impact the future of the WordPress ecosystem?
Marie Dodson is an editorial assistant at Torque. She graduated from Cornell University with a degree in Biology and Society. She enjoys wine, good books, and travel.
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