How it started
History
Matt Mullenweg co-founded the open-source blogging platform WordPress in 2003. Two years later, he founded Automattic to monetize the platform.
Initially the company developed commercial products related to WordPress, including WordPress.com for WordPress-managed hosting and the spam filtering service Akismet. Toni Schneider, a former executive at Yahoo, became chief executive officer (CEO) in 2006. Automattic acquired Gravatar in 2007, then IntenseDebate and PollDaddy in 2008.
Automattic transferred the WordPress source code and trademarks to the WordPress Foundation in 2010 and it also acquired the prompt generator Plinky. In 2011, the company created Jetpack, a WordPress extension.
Automattic acquired Lean Domain Search and CloudUp in 2013. In 2014, Automattic raised $160 million in a venture round, acquired Longreads, and Mullenweg became CEO. Schneider remained as an adviser while Mullenweg led product development. Automattic acquired WooCommerce and relaunched the hosted version of its content manager, WordPress.com, in 2015. This version replaced PHP with JavaScript and simplified administrative design. Automattic also launched a WordPress application with Mac support.
Automattic's remote working culture was the topic of a participative journalism project by Scott Berkun, resulting in the 2013 book The Year Without Pants: WordPress.com and the Future of Work.
From Wikipedia’s article on Automattic, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.3