Automattic

Matt Mullenweg, co-founder of WordPress, started Automattic in 2005; the double t is a nod to his first name. The company runs WordPress.com and has bought or built a long list of services around it: Akismet for comment spam, Gravatar, Jetpack and the WooCommerce shop plugin. In 2019 it bought Tumblr from Verizon for a fraction of what Yahoo had once paid.

Automattic is also known for being fully distributed long before the pandemic made it fashionable. The line between the company and the open-source project has always been blurry, though, since Mullenweg runs both. That became obvious in 2024, when he locked rival host WP Engine out of wordpress.org and took over one of its popular plugins.