Automattic Inc., the parent company of the blogging platform WordPress.com, is making a foray in a new direction with the acquisition of all-in-one messaging app Texts.com, which the company is buying for $50 million.

Texts.com acts as a universal app that links all messaging apps into one inbox including iMessage, WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal, Messenger, Twitter, Instagram, Discord and LinkedIn. It provides end-to-end encryption along with an artificial intelligence assistant capable of providing chat summaries, drafting responses and translating answers. It’s essentially a way to concentrate all messaging into one place.

The service says it aims to help people resolve issues of switching between apps in order to find messages in order to discover and keep up with chat threads. With everything all in one inbox, people can more easily maintain conversations and not miss out on communication.

Automattic has a multitude of online publishing properties, including WordPress.com for blogging, Tumblr, which it acquired from Verizon Communications Inc. in 2019, for online advertisement publishing, WooCommerce for ecommerce and the podcasts app Pocket Casts for podcasting. In March, the company acquired ActivityPub for WordPress, a plug-in that allows blog owners to join distributed web networks, such as Mastodon.

Matt Mullenweg, chief executive of Automattic, told The Verge that the acquisition of Texts.com would help the company focus on reaching more people in the ways that they communicate in the ways that humans reach out to one another.

“I like to pick areas I feel are so fundamental to the human condition that I can work on this the rest of my life,” Mullenweg said. “Self-publishing, commerce and messaging covers a good chunk of all human activity, and they’re also three areas where I think an open-source solution is necessary for the long term.”

Texts.com founder Kishan Bagaria will be joining the company as the new Head of Messaging and the rest of the fully-distributed team will be saying on and working on finishing the mobile app.

Currently the Texts.com app is a tool that costs $15 a month, but Mullenweg said that might change over time depending on the market. For example, there might be a free version in the future with more limited options available for users.

Image: Texts.com