A San Francisco company that was an early pioneer of website building software is buying a three-year-old messaging app for tens of millions.
Wordpress.com owner Automattic is buying Texts for $50 million, according to The Verge which first reported the deal.
It's unclear exactly where Texts is based, but Crunchbase shows New York and its founder and CEO Kishan Bagaria is in San Francisco, according to his LinkedIn profile.
Automattic also owns Tumblr, which it bought for an undisclosed amount in 2019. According to PitchBook, the Tumblr deal was worth an estimated $3 million.
As its name suggests, Texts is a messaging platform that lets users manage other messaging services all in one place, instead of having to check multiple apps.
Texts supports "all major messaging platforms," according to its website, including iMessage, WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram, Messenger, X/Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Slack and Discord.
Notably, Texts says it doesn't store any user content. Rather, it encrypts data on users' devices and sends it directly to the relevant messaging platforms, essentially acting as a conduit. It makes money from subscription fees.
The startup's approach to security and interoperability is a big part of the reason why the San Francisco company is buying Texts, Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg told The Verge.
“I like to pick areas I feel are so fundamental to the human condition that I can work on this the rest of my life,” Mullenweg told The Verge. “Self-publishing, commerce, and messaging covers a good chunk of all human activity, and they’re also three areas where I think an open-source solution is necessary for the long term.”
In a blog post announcing the deal, Automattic also pointed to other features that make Texts an attractive service such as "scheduling messages to send when your recipient is awake, or the ability to mark as unread on services that still don’t have it" in addition to "keyboard shortcuts, a customizable interface, and even group chat summaries for when you’ve been away for a few hours and come back to 100+ unread messages."
Mullenweg co-founded Automattic in 2005 and the company made its first acquisition just a couple of years later when it bought Gravatar, a San Francisco company that allows users to make small avatars to display on profiles.
Automattic has acquired more than two dozen companies since then, now including Texts. Other notable acquisitions include San Francisco-based e-commerce platform WooCommerce; media companies Atavist and Longreads; Tumblr; Bloom Built which develops the online journaling app Day One; podcast platform Pocket Casts; and a San Francisco-based image generator for social sharing called Social Image Generator.
Automattic has raised more than $820 million in equity funding over the past 18 years and its investors include Salesforce Ventures, The New York Times, Tiger Global Management, ICONIQ Growth, Insight Partners, BlackRock and CNET Networks. The company was valued at $7.5 billion after a round of secondary sales in 2021, according to PitchBook.
