The company was founded in August 2005 by Matt Mullenweg, co-creator of WordPress. As of May 2018, the company has 721 employees working from 62 different countries and speaking 81 different languages. The company is privately held and based in San Francisco, but their employees can work from anywhere.
The most notable product offered by Automattic is the blog and website service WordPress.com, which was launched in beta form alongside Automattic itself in August 2005. The service was made available to the public in November the same year. Other products owned by Automattic include the anti-spam service Akismet, the e-commerce software WooCommerce, the WordPress plugin Jetpack, the avatar service Gravatar, and many others.
Automattic is also one of the WordPress ecosystems biggest contributors to open source projects and non-profits, including WordPress itself, the WordPress Foundation and WordCamp US.