The identities of the investors in Automattic have been disclosed. Explaining on his blog, Mike Hirshland from Polaris Venture Partners outlines his reasoning for investing in Automattic:
We just announced leading a small round of funding with Automattic, a San Francisco based startup whose team is most known for its leading role in creating the open source personal publishing (ie, blog) platform WordPress, blog spam blocker Akismet, and blog pinging service Ping-o-Matic. I am also really happy to have the chance to be partnering on this venture with Phil Black from Blacksmith Capital and Doug Mackenzie from Radar Partners.
Although a relatively small investment, we believe this will be a very exciting project to be involved with.
Automattic CEO Toni Schneider comments on his weblog:
Who are your investors?
Polaris Ventures (Mike Hirshland), Blacksmith Capital (Phil Black, now at True Ventures), Radar Partners (Doug Mackenzie), and CNET (Shelby Bonnie).
Why did you raise VC money?
Because we want to invest money into a rock solid infrastructure for wordpress.com and we want to have a buffer of money in the bank to be able to make long term decisions without having to worry about cutting it too close every month.
