Crowd Favorite to be acquired by VeloMedia

Crowd Favorite and VeloMedia have reached an agreement where VeloMedia will acquire Crowd Favorite, with the transaction to occur early next year.

Crowd Favorite was founded by Alex King, one of the earliest regular contributors to WordPress. King’s freelance web development businesses officially became Crowd Favorite in 2007. Today, Crowd Favorite serves enterprise-level WordPress services to all sorts of clients. They are one of the most respected WordPress development agencies in the industry, and perhaps the oldest in the WordPress space as well.

VeloMedia is a newer name to many in the WordPress community, but they also do almost all enterprise-level work. They have recently reached out across the WordPress community participating in and sponsoring WordCamps and other events.

Karim Marucchi is the CEO of VeloMedia. I had an opportunity to spend a good amount of time with him at WordCamp Birmingham a few months ago. He’s a very smart guy with a lot of experience under his belt. He had the following to say about the decision to acquire Crowd Favorite:

VeloMedia’s experience in enterprise software consulting is now matched by Crowd Favorite’s long-standing WordPress expertise. As the longest-running WordPress consultancy, there was no question Crowd Favorite had the approach, skills, and experience to further our efforts in bringing WordPress to our Fortune 500 clients.

With the announcement, I’m told that VeloMedia and Crowd Favorite will both be known under the Crowd Favorite brand. With the addition of Crowd Favorite’s Denver office, VeloMedia / Crowd Favorite will now have six offices: Los Angelos (VeloMedia’s parent office), Denver (Crowd Favorite HQ), Las Vegas, New York, Rome, and Bucharest.

This is one of the first such transactions I’ve seen in the WordPress ecosystem. It means many things, but one for sure is that consulting in the WordPress space is more and more very serious business.

I’m personally really excited, because I know how well regarded Crowd Favorite is, and I have also spent enough time with Karim Marucchi to know that he’s committed to providing world class services while also supporting the WordPress community itself. I am also friends with Chris Lema, who serves on VeloMedia’s board, and his business wisdom will surely be well utilized in this venture.

I’m sure we will learn over the next couple of days more about the personal motivations for Crowd Favorite to make this decision to join up with VeloMedia. What we know so far is that Alex King will be the CTO in the new company structure. King said the following of the acquisition:

I’m really excited to be joining forces with VeloMedia. I feel the culture and focus on craftsmanship at Crowd Favorite is special, and was thrilled to find that VeloMedia shares our values. We look forward to a continued focus on development excellence, employee culture and, most importantly, top notch service for our clients.

Congratulations to both parties.