Sometime in 2003, a 19-year-old Houston kid named Matt Mullenweg dropped out of college to concentrate on an open source software project focused on improving typography for online writers—a project with fewer than 20 users at that time.

Today, Matt is one of the founders of the company that makes WordPress, and has about 25 engineers working for him remotely, as well as thousands of unpaid software developers working to make the WordPress platform better. He and his team of developers are also behind Ping-o-Matic, Akismet, Gravatar, bbPress, and other projects. The company’s free, hosted version of the blog software, at WordPress.com, draws in over 90 million pageviews per month on its own, ranking No. 31 on Alexa.com, the online traffic measuring service, excluding the other several million websites that run their own self-hosted installation of the software suite.

The San Francisco Chronicle recently profiled Mullenweg when his company raised $29.5 million in venture funding this January:

“Mullenweg is the founder of San Francisco’s Automattic, which runs the blog service WordPress, home to 4 million blogs worldwide. Blogs are updated 18 times every second, and the open-source WordPress has become the service of choice for many of the mainstream media and blogosphere’s biggest players.”

WordPress is now the leading blog platform on the net with over 3.8 million downloads in 2007 and in use by major news organizations including the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Time, CNN, Fox, and Fortune 500 companies like Ford Motor Company, GE, and Sony. Mullenweg’s company, Automattic, has raised $30.6 million to date from Polaris Venture Partners, Blacksmith Capital, Radar Partners, True Ventures and the New York Times Co. and appears to be positioned to continue growth. With their recent release of WordPress 2.6 they continue to improve web aesthetics and the ease of use for online content publishers.

[source: Founder of blog platform gets venture funding at SFGate]