Automattic, the parent company of world’s one of the most popular CMS and blogging platform WordPress has announced acquisition of WooThemes, maker of themes and plugins for WordPress. The deal is reported to be worth $30 million in cash and stock.
Apart from making website themes for WordPress, WooThemes is also popular for its e-commerce platform plugin called WooCommerce. The WooCommerce plugin has about 7.6 million downloads and over a million active installations. Automattic had acquired WoCommerce just a couple of days back.
WooCommerce competes with other SaaS based e-commerce service providers like Shopify and Big Commerce. The company claims that almost 25% of e-commerce websites uses WooCommerce.
It is expected that Automattic will continue running WooThemes as a separate entity. The WooThemes team, consisting of about 55 people will continue doing their job. Existing users will have same service and tools.
This is considered as Automatic’s largest acquisition to date. It is now looking forward to growing and expanding its reach for the global e-commerce platform.
WooThemes was founded in 2008 by Adriaan Pienaar, Magnus Jepson, and Mark Forrester. It is currently working in around 20 different countries.
Automattic was founded in 2005 by Matt Mullenweg. Till now, it has received $317.3 million in 5 funding rounds from 14 investors. It has also made 17 acquisitions. WordPress is powering over 23% of the websites on internet and with the completion of this deal, Automattic now has more than 380 employees in 42 countries.
