Automattic Funding and Future
News has spread that Automattic, the provider behind the WordPress.org and WordPress.com as well as the Akismet anti-spam plugin has raised approximately $29.5 million dollars in a series B round of financing led by the New York Times, and the existing investors - True and Polaris.
In Matt Mullenweg’s post and from Gigaom, Automattic looks to be heading in a direction that will bring many improvements and services to the blogging community. Specifically, they want to expand their investments in anti-spam (Akisment), wikis, forums (BBPress), the Gravatar service with a focus on more hosted services. The money is also expected to first go to paying off bills (as they are aroudn the break-even point), then hiring more developers and building upon the current infrastructure to make it more efficient.
The past two to three years have brought a lot to the Automattic company - the growth of WordPress grew exponentially - with more than 3,852,554 downloads of WordPress.org (self-hosted) in the past year and more than 1.8 million new users of the WordPress.com service.
While Matt denied any possible sell out of the Automattic company, he also stated that he wants to maintain the same philosophy and approach that has made WordPress what it is today.
