Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, is acquiring Beeper, the company behind the iMessage-on-Android solution named in the Department of Justice's antitrust lawsuit against Apple. The sources close to the matter said that the deal is for $125 million and is the second acquisition made by Automattic related to a cross-platform messaging solution after it bought Texts.com last October.

That deal brought Kishan Bagaria, the founder of Texts.com, on board as Automattic's newest head of Messaging, but that mantle now falls to Eric Migicovsky - previously a founder of Pebble smartwatches and an investment partner at Y Combinator.

Reached for comment, Automattic said the onboarding process of the Beeper team has already begun and that they are "excited about the progress made" so far but couldn't yet share more about its organizational updates or what Bagaria's new title would be. However, we're told he's staying to work on Beeper as well.

Teams are also sizeable at Beeper and Texts.com, with 25 and 15 members, respectively. "So we'll take the best from each company's product and merge it into one platform," Migicovsky said. But going forward, the Beeper brand will apply to all of the messaging efforts at Automattic, he said. "Kishan … I've known him for years now — there's not too many other people in the world that are doing what we do — and it was great to be able to combine forces with them," he said.

The deal, which closed April 1, is a big bet from Automattic: it's that the future of messaging will be open source and work across services, rather than getting locked up in proprietary platforms, like Meta's WhatsApp or Apple's iMessage. In fact, the plan is eventually to move users from that Beeper cross-platform app for handling messages to Beeper's own chat protocol something based on the open-source protocol known as Matrix.

Automattic had earlier made a strategic investment of $4.6 million in Element (previously New Vector), another firm building on Matrix and contributes annually to Matrix.org, as does Beeper.

In fact, Matrix is sort of a "spiritual successor" to XMPP, as he himself describes it. Offering an open source end-to-end encrypted client and server communications system, whereby servers federate with one another, much like Mastodon, that free alternative to Twitter/X, the focus here is on messaging, rather than social networking.

Running Beeper costs a lot of money," Migicovsky explained. "It was either time to raise more money or find a buyer." To date, Beeper has raised $16 million in external funding-most recently an $8 million Series A from Initialized. Other investors include YC, Samsung Next, and Liquid2 Ventures and angels Garry Tan, Kevin Mahaffey and Niv Dror, and the group SV Angel.

"I've known Matt [Mullenweg, founder and CEO of Automattic] for years now," Migicovsky said, noting that the WordPress.com founder had demonstrated a commitment to open source technology, like Beeper in which about half its product is already open source. "We were looking to find a partner that could financially support this.". That's why, among other things, nobody else builds apps like that: it costs a surprising amount of money to make a damn good chat app, Migicovsky noted.

About Beeper's products, the company has briefed DOJ about what happened once Apple blocked its newer app called Beeper Mini when it attempted to bring iMessage to Android. As a consequence of those moves from Apple, that solution is no longer being updated.
Beeper on Android launching to all
Meanwhile, the company is launching an updated version of its main app, Beeper, for Android. Unlike Beeper Mini, which is strictly limited to iMessage, the main app connects to 14 services - including Messenger, WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal, Instagram DM, LinkedIn, Twitter/X, Discord, Google Messages and more. Android is its biggest user platform since 70% run Google's smartphone OS.

In this version of Beeper, the company is starting to roll out end-to-end encrypted messages across Signal, which will soon be followed by WhatsApp, Messenger, and Google Messages.

Because of Apple's restrictions, iMessage is only going to work if you have an iPhone in the mix, says Migicovsky; it won't be a focus for Beeper given the complications it saw with Apple's shutdown of Beeper Mini. However, regulations may be the thing that changes things, Beeper hopes, citing both the DOJ lawsuit and FCC investigation. Until then, Beeper supports RCS, which solves iMessage-to-Android problems like low-res images and videos, lack of typing indicators and encryption.

Now that the app has left beta, it comes with a new icon, updated design, instant chat opens and sends, and ability to add and modify chat networks directly on Android without needing a desktop app, local caching of all chats on the device, and full message search.

In addition, the 10,000 android beta testers already on Beeper will be required to download the new app manually from Google Play-it will not automatically update.

Secondly, the 466,000 or so people on Beeper's waitlist are going to be able to test the product. They will join over 115,000 users who have downloaded the app so far, which now has tens of thousands in daily use. The app is available for Android, iPhone, iPad, ChromeOS, macOS, Windows, and Linux.

Parity of features between platforms could be achieved in a matter of months as the team overhauls iOS and desktop applications.

More services will also be gradually integrated into Beeper, including Google Voice, Snapchat, and Microsoft Teams. Beeper has also put in place a widget API so that developers can build on top of Beeper. And because Matrix is an open standard, developers will also be allowed to build alternative clients for Beeper, too.

The revenue of the app will be based on a paid-for premium subscription, with the final price likely to be a few dollars a month, though pricing has yet to be finally decided. Beeper is free to sign up for.
Like Automattic, its team is all over the map from Brazil to the U.K., Germany and the U.S. For now, Texts.com will remain available as the teams begin to integrate both services.