Automattic acquires spellchecking company After the Deadline

Fairly or not, the Internet has earned a reputation as the home for typos, incorrect spelling, and bad grammar. I’ve certainly been responsible for my share of cringeworthy mistakes. Automattic, the company that created the WordPress blogging platform (which powers VentureBeat and many other sites), is taking steps to improve that with the just-announced acquistion of a spell-checking startup called After the Deadline.
After the Deadline founder Raphael Mudge writes that his goal in developing the technology was to “bring word processor quality proofreading tools to the Internet.” It’s supposed to be particularly good at flagging spelling and grammar mistakes, as well as other issues with word use (such as inflammatory language) because it’s sensitive to context. And it does all of that as you’re writing, rather than as a separate process at the end.
Now that San Francisco-based Automattic has acquired After the Deadline (for an undisclosed sum), the spellchecker is now live as a feature for blogs hosted at WordPress.com, and is available as a plug-in for WordPress blogs that are hosted elsewhere. Here’s why Automattic co-founder Matt Mullenwegsays he was impressed:
When I first tried After the Deadline I was blown away; it was so much better than other checkers I’d used, and it was by one guy building this thing that solves a problem other folks have teams of PhDs trying to solve. I reached out to Raphael (the one guy) to see how we could get this technology in front of WordPress users and ended up doing a deal for Automattic to buy his entire company. The other cool thing about this new technology is that it’s getting better every day — Raphael is constantly adding new rules and heuristics, and the technology is learning from millions of blog posts on WP.com to make the contextual parts of the checker smarter and smarter.
This probably didn’t cost Automattic too much money — Mullenweg and Mudge both makes this sound like a single hire, plus the acquisition of the technology, of course. Mudge’s posts also outlines a number of near-miss attempts to join incubators or raise funding, so there aren’t investors who need to be paid off either.