Automattic Spurns $200 Million Acquisition Offer
Written by on October 29th, 2007 in Ajax News.
Automattic, the company that created the Wordpress.com blogging platform and oversees the Wordpress.org open source project, has rejected a $200 million acquisition offer, says multiple sources. Half the price was to be paid in cash, half in stock in the buyer.
The company, which has raised just $1.1 million in capital, has been on a tear lately. They acquired avatar startup Gravatar earlier this month. And Comscore says Wordpress.com had nearly 63 million unique worldwide visitors in September 2007, up 66% from May’s 38 million visitors. What I don’t know is the company’s revenue.
Building a real business around open source software is doable - see RedHat’s $4.1 billion market cap as an example. And rumor is that MySQL is planning an IPO of their own in the near future. For Automattic to spurn a $200 million offer means they are thinking along the lines of going public themselves, or at least a significantly higher acquisition price. Down the road, with the benefit of hindsight, we’ll know if they made the right decision or not.
Automattic declined to comment on this post.
cb_widget_report_widget(”cb_widget_1193706811″); cb_widget_report_element(”cb_widget_0_1193706811″,”automattic”);
Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/176944091/