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WordPress Company Raises $30 million

23 January 2008 - 10:48pm — Bevan

The late breaking news ripping through the twitter-sphere and hitting the blogosphere is that

Matt Mullenweg, founder of Automattic and creator of open-source blogging system WordPress... raised a whopping $29.5 million in a Series B Round of funding, including a strategic investment from The New York Times Co. True Ventures led the round, which includes previous investors Polaris Ventures and Radar Ventures. (Full disclosure: both Automattic and GigaOM are backed by True Ventures.)

Matt confirmed this in his blog.

This comes at an interesting time in relation to Acquia's news of "$7 million in a Series A financing".

Although this doesn't affect Drupal, Dries or Acquia directly in any way that I can think of it's interesting to compare;

  • Acquia raised 'Series A' financing while Automattic raised 'Series B' financing. I have NFI what the difference is and was hoping someone could tell me.
  • Automattic raised almost 30M -- more than 4 times what Acquia raised 7M.
  • Automattic is more than two years old, while Acquia is barely two months old.
  • While Acquia isn't offering any commercial or consumer service or product yet, Automattic is already providing a wide range of free and commercial consumer-oriented products and services. They seem to be targeting the casual blogger; a niche ranging from the blogspot.com blogger to startups, hobbiests, non-profits and low-budget bloggers.