WordPress Act Two: $29.5M worth of identity, wikis, forums, and more

Automattic, the company behind the WordPress blogging platform, just raised $29.5 million. As is often the case, GigaOM has the scoop:

While we were chatting, he let it slip that Automattic had 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.

Correction:

Polaris Venture Partners is the lead investor, having provided $20m of the $29.5 million (Mike Hirshland, general partner at Polaris, is on the WordPress board).

Source: an email from KMC Partners, who handles PR for Polaris. I just checked the Polaris site. There's a news item on the investment but no numbers.

Founder Matthew Mullenweg fills in the details:

Fast forward to 2007: ... should we sell [the company], or build out Automattic to be an independent company for many years to come.
...
That decision actually wasn’t hard. I couldn’t stop thinking about the opportunities and it became clear that the road ahead was much longer than the road behind us.
...
Automattic is now positioned to execute on our vision of a better web not just in blogging, but expanding our investment in anti-spam, identity, wikis, forums, and more — small, open source pieces, loosely joined with the same approach and philosophy that has brought us this far.

Read the whole post for a quick wrap-up of 2005-2007. For example:

revenues grew quickly, allowing us to remain break-even even as the team scaled to 18 full-time folks and a number of contractors ... we started to look like a real company despite having no office and some of us never meeting in person.