Automattic, the parent company of WordPress.com has acquired Frontity. Frontity provides an open-source React framework for websites that are powered by WordPress. The entire team of Frontity, including its founders Pablo Postigo (CEO) and Luis Herranz (lead developer), will now work with Automattic. They will undertake the WordPress open-source project in particular and focus on improving the performance of website and frontend development tools. Postigo wrote that the acquisition comes after a series of talks and that the team will work on improving the site editing developer experience. He considers it as a great opportunity for his team to deliver a good impact in the long run.
WordPress currently powers 40% of all websites. It offers the omnipresent content management system (CMS) in two versions. One es the open-source, self-hosted version via WordPress.org. The other one is the hosted entity that is controlled by Automattic via WordPress.com. The latter one is also commercialized by Automattic. But the recent acquisition is connected with the former one. Frontity began its journey in 2015 in Spain as Worona. It developed to become a framework that helps developers to take the benefits of the React JavaScript library on their WordPress websites. It is mainly about eliminating the complex nature of linking WordPress and React so that developers can focus on other development needs and enable fast-loading WordPress websites. In its seed round last year it was able to raise $1.2 million. Automattic was one of the investors of the seed round.
Automattic is mainly known for the WordPress brand. It is slowly beginning to target businesses with a number of new tools and products. It has also made investments and acquisitions to expand its scope. This year Automattic had acquired Parse.ly and invested in Titan and Element. The company also recently announced that it had raised $288 million in a financing round in February. This fund is used to power acquisitions and hiring.
The Frontity acquisition is more of following the trend of businesses taking up a “headless” architecture. It means that the backend and frontend of the software will be detached in order to ensure maximum freedom and flexibility. Frontity has clarified that it will handle WordPress development with its vast knowledge of frontend operations and development. Their existing framework will continue for now and will be slowly transferred to a new community of maintainers. This is because the entire team of Frontity will be working on WordPress-related tasks.
