Today Automattic announced it has closed a new $300 million Series D, with Salesforce Ventures taking the entire round. This puts us at a post-round valuation of $3 billion, three times what it was after our last fundraising round in 2014. It’s a tremendous vote of confidence for Automattic and for the open web.

I met Marc Benioff earlier this year, and it became obvious to both of us that Salesforce and Automattic shared a lot of principles and philosophies. Marc is a mindful leader and his sensibilities and sense of purpose feel well aligned with our own mission to make the web a better place. He also helped open my eyes to the incredible traction WordPress and WP VIP has seen in the enterprise market, and how much potential there still is there. I’ve also loved re-connecting with Bret Taylor who is now Salesforce’s President and Chief Product Officer. Bret’s experience across Google Maps, Friendfeed, Facebook, Quip, and now transforming Salesforce makes him one of the singular product thinkers out there and our discussion of Automattic’s portfolio of services have been very helpful already.

For Automattic, the funding will allow us to accelerate our roadmap (perhaps by double) and scale up our existing products—including WordPress.com, WordPress VIP, WooCommerce, Jetpack, and (in a few days when it closes) Tumblr. It will also allow us to increase investing our time and energy into the future of the open source WordPress and Gutenberg.

The Salesforce funding is also a vote of confidence for the future of work. Automattic has grown to more than 950 employees working from 71 countries, with no central office for several years now. Distributed work is going to reshape how we spread opportunity more equitably around the world. There continue to be new heights shown of what can be achieved in a distributed fashion, with Gitlab announcing a round at $2.75B earlier this week.

Next year Automattic celebrates 15 years as a company! The timing is fortuitous as we’ve all just returned from Automattic’s annual Grand Meetup, where more than 800 of us got together in person to share our experiences, explore new ideas, and have some fun. I am giddy to work alongside these wonderful people for another 15 years and beyond.

If you’re curious my previous posts on our fundraising, here’s our 2006 Series A, 2008 Series B, 2013 secondary, and 2014 Series C. As before, happy to answer questions in the comments here. I also did an exclusive interview with Romain Dillet on (WP-powered) Techcrunch.

30 replies on “Automattic’s Series D”

  6. Causes me to wonder how long before WordPress.org transforms into SaaS? Will the new funding accelerate the march in that inevitable direction?

    2. This was my exact fear as well: how long before the open-source vanishes. I’d like to see us kick Shopify’s butt, but I’d still like to keep my open-source family close by as well.

  11. Yours is an amazing story Matt! For those of us that are fighting to monetize open source while at the same time stay true to our core philosophy’s, it is inspiring to watch Automattics journey. If you ever feel like helping a small company out with general advice we would love it.

    Regardless, congratulations!

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  14. Kudos !

    I really appreciate the way you have been sticking to your principles and philosophies. With the quantum of growth it is very difficult for someone to not be distracted and stick to your goals.

  16. Fantastic. I can see all kinds of ways for WordPress to connect to the Salesforce ecosystem. I’m quite curious whether this means there will be better native connectivity between Salesforce and WordPress. Building anything in an enterprise-level CMS, and the question about Salesforce connectivity always comes up. I’ve seen a couple of cases where lack of easy Salesforce integration has been the deciding factor when choosing an enterprise CMS.

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