I’m excited to announce that Beeper has been acquired by Automattic. This acquisition marks the beginning of an exciting new chapter as we continue our mission to create the best chat app on earth.

If you haven’t heard of Beeper before, welcome! We make a universal chat app – one app to send and receive messages on 14 different chat networks. You might have also heard about Beeper Mini, our briefly available iMessage-on-Android app.

In many ways, our journey has only just begun. Beeper has just over 115,000 users and was, until today, in beta. Given the state of the messaging landscape today, we believe there is a huge opportunity for us to push boundaries and create new experiences in chat. The majority of other chat apps have stagnated, entrenched in their positions, with no significant new players emerging since Discord’s launch in 2015. Given the state of the messaging world, we’ve long felt the need for a strong ally with the resources to support us on our quest. Automattic has a long history of putting user control and privacy first with open source, and great bilateral relationships with Meta, Apple, Microsoft, Google, Matrix and others that we hope can usher in a new era of collaboration.

It’s a fantastic match. Automattic is best known for supporting WordPress and WooCommerce – two open source software projects that underpin huge portions of the internet’s publishing and ecommerce infrastructure. Together, we’ll develop software for a third fundamental pillar of the internet: chat.

Matt, Automattic’s CEO, and I have known each other for years. He was an early user, supporter and investor in Beeper. We’re very well aligned on our goal (build the best chat app on earth), approach (open source where possible), and independence (Beeper will operate independently as part of Automattic’s Other Bets division).

This is a big bet. Automattic is doubling down on chat after their acquisition last year of Texts.com, a messaging app with a similar mission. Our teams and products will merge, and I will take on the role leading the team as Head of Messaging. It will take a bit of time for us to integrate and combine forces under the Beeper brand. We’ve got big plans! I’m really excited about the future of chat 📟

Eric Migicovsky

Beeper CEO → Automattic Head of Messaging

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For Beeper users…

• The Beeper app you know and love is only going to get better with the support of Automattic! In fact, today we’re making Beeper available to everyone – no more waitlist. Learn more.
• Our privacy policy and terms of service remain the same, though they may change in the future.
• As always, Beeper (and now Automattic Inc.) cannot view any of your historical chat history. All messages are encrypted with a key that only you have before being stored. Read more about our security and privacy commitments.
• Our business model is unchanged. We build a fantastic free chat app, then charge for additional premium features.
• If you no longer would like to use Beeper, visit account.beeper.com to delete your account.

For Texts.com users…

• Nothing is changing today. Texts is the same product today as it was yesterday.
• Beeper and Texts share a common goal of building the best chat app on earth. Texts’ commitment to local data processing will be preserved.
• Over time, we will work to integrate the teams and products. More news to come in the future!