WordPress.com parent company Automattic has acquired Simperium, the startup that runs a data syncing platform and is also well-known for Simplenote, the personal note-keeping app that’s been described as “a lightweight version of Evernote.”
Financial details of the deal have not been disclosed. Simperium first launched in August 2010 out of Silicon Valley startup incubator Y Combinator. The three-person company closed a $450,000 seed round in 2011 from Y Combinator, Google Ventures, Kal Vepuri, David Tisch, Geoff Ralston, David and Alaina Sloo, Alex Payne, and ENIAC Ventures. I’m told that Simplenote has some 750,000 registered users.
As part of Automattic, both Simperium’s data-syncing app platform and Simplenote will live on, founders Mike Johnston and Fred Cheng said in blog posts announcing the deal, noting: “You know how sometimes, the services you love just disappear when they’re bought by someone else? Or they wither and die a slow and painful death? Not the case here. We made sure of that.” Automattic founder Matt Mullenweg himself is a long-time Simplenote fan who actually pitched in to buy the Simplenote.com domain name from a domain squatter, they added.
Here’s an excerpt from one Simperium blog post about the the future plans:
“In joining Automattic, we’re working with more resources and a growing, complementary team. Our plan is to supercharge Simplenote with a lot more attention in the months and years to come: native apps for more platforms, ongoing improvements, and more work on Simperium, our service for keeping your data in sync. Of course, Simplenote will stay simple. We know how important that is to you. It’s what kept it in the top apps of 2012, and it’s important to the team here as well.
Simplenote is in good hands. Our new family, now over 140 people strong and distributed around the world, lives and breathes all things internet. They get this stuff. We get this stuff. We build and use a wide variety of online tools every day to stay in sync with each other as a company.”
Simperium is a Y Combinator-funded company that builds a platform for syncing content among people and their devices. They released Simplenote as a showcase of this platform.
Automattic is the company behind WordPress.com, the simplest, most secure way to start web-publishing immediately on the open source WordPress platform. They also make Jetpack for WordPress, which bundles a number of social improvements to the WordPress core software as a single plugin. Automattic offers a number of products, like VaultPress and Akismet, on a freemium model so anyone can use them for free, and later have the choice to pay extra for premium features. Automattic has over 150 employees, including...
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