WordPress parent company Automattic sees $50M investment from Tiger Global

Blogging service WordPress’s parent company Automattic is getting a $50 million investment from Tiger Global, according to WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg.

The announcement comes from a blog post on Mullenweg’s personal site today, and this comes just days after rival blogging platform/community Tumblr sold to iconic tech giant Yahoo for a whopping $1.2 billion.

Mullenweg notes that the investment comes from a secondary sale led by Tiger Global’s Lee Fixel, meaning Tiger Global purchased shares from early Automattic employees and investors. He also notes that Fixel was one of the “quiet geniuses” that previously invested in successful tech companies such as SurveyMonkey, Facebook, LinkedIn, Palantir, and Square.

Here’s what Mullenweg had to say on his blog about the investment:

“Anyway, wanted to get in front of the news that will inevitably come out in the next week or two: there has been a large secondary transaction in Automattic stock, about $50M worth. “Secondary” means that it’s existing stockholders, like the earliest investors or employees, selling stock to another investor versus money going into the company (“primary”). It was led by Lee Fixel at Tiger Global, one of the behind-the-scenes quiet geniuses that has previously invested in SurveyMonkey, Facebook, LinkedIn, Palantir, Square, Warby Parker… Automattic is healthy, generating cash, and already growing as fast as it can so there’s no need for the company to raise money directly — we’re not capital constrained. The minority of stockholders that elected to participate are holding on to the vast majority of their shares. We’re building an independent company that’s going to be a growing part of the fabric of the web for many years to come, so allowing early investors to lock in some returns releases any short-term pressure there might be on the company for a liquidity event and allows us to focus fully on the long road ahead.”

h/t to AllThingsD

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