Automattic Announces Mark Davies as Chief Financial Officer

SAN FRANCISCO, Oct. 16, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Automattic Inc., the parent company of WordPress.com, WooCommerce, and Tumblr, among other products, has announced that Mark Davies has joined the company as Chief Financial Officer.

Davies comes to Automattic from Vivint, a $1B+ annual revenue smart home technology company, where he served as chief financial officer since 2013.

The news follows Automattic's recent $300 million Series D investment round from Salesforce Ventures, and its acquisition in September of the social blogging platform Tumblr.

"Automattic is creating the operating system for the web, from websites to ecommerce to social networks," said Matt Mullenweg, founder and CEO of Automattic and cofounder of WordPress. "As we zoom past 1,100 employees in over 70 countries, we wanted a financial leader with experience taking businesses from hundreds of millions in revenue to billions and even tens of billions, as Mark has. I'm excited about working alongside such an experienced leader day-to-day to build one of the defining technology companies of this era."

Stuart West, who served as Automattic's CFO for the past seven years, will remain with the company in a new role.

"I want to thank Stu for his significant contributions to Automattic during his seven and a half years as CFO," Mullenweg said. "He built a talented finance team during a period of 10x growth in staff and revenue and played an essential role in the success of our company."

Prior to Vivint, Davies worked for Alcoa as president of global business services and as a member of the Alcoa executive council. He spent twelve years at Dell Inc., most recently as the managing vice president of strategic programs, reporting directly to Michael Dell; and he served as chief financial officer of the Global Consumer Group, a $14B enterprise with worldwide operations.

Mark earned his bachelor's degree in accounting from Western Washington University and his MBA in finance from Arizona State University.

About Automattic

Automattic wants to make the web a better place. We're the company behind products including WordPress.com, WooCommerce, Tumblr, Jetpack, and enterprise WP VIP, and we're a fully distributed company, with more than 1,000 employees in 72 countries speaking 89 different languages. Our common goal is to democratize publishing so that anyone with a story can tell it, regardless of income, gender, politics, language, or where they live in the world. We believe in Open Source and the vast majority of our work is available under the GPL.

SOURCE Automattic