Automattic Raises $29.5 Million

Automat­tic, the fast-grow­ing com­pa­ny behind the pop­u­lar Word­Press blog­ging soft­ware (heav­i­ly endorsed by Soma Design) and the free WordPress.com blog­ging ser­vice, just announced a $29.5 mil­lion round of fund­ing.

One of the fas­ci­nat­ing things is that the NY Times, that bas­tion of old media, was one of the investors. This makes total sense once you look a lit­tle deep­er and real­ize that the NY Times are using Word­Press to pow­er their ever-expand­ing col­lec­tion of blogs.

What this means is that Word­Press has a long, bright future ahead of it with the peo­ple who loved it before they had any idea that they could make mon­ey off it still right in the thick of things and get­ting paid well to boot. It means that small web design shops like ours can expect Word­Press to con­tin­ue being a ter­rif­ic and evolv­ing plat­form upon which to build web­sites (like this one) for years to come.

On more per­son­al note, I must extend a hearty con­grat­u­la­tions to Matt and the team at Automat­tic for being reward­ed for their ter­rif­ic work. Good job!