Automattic

Automattic Inc. is a US company headquartered in San Francisco, founded in 2005 by Matt Mullenweg. It operates WordPress.com and owns and stewards WooCommerce, Jetpack, Tumblr and WPVIP.

Its products sit on top of WordPress, the open-source content management system that runs a large share of the web. That is the shape of the dependency worth understanding: the WooCommerce plugin is open source and free to run on your own server, but the surrounding commercial layer — paid extensions, hosting and support — is Automattic’s, and so is the direction of the project.