All you have to do is take a stroll around the Woodstock Exchange, look past the proliferation of glorious beards and tattoos and you will start to notice the amount of startups on every corner. Yes folks our geniuses are hard at work and, as a whole, the South African tech startup field is really coming into its own.

Our latest success story is the guys over at WooCommerce, recently acquired by the US based Automattic, the team behind the wildly successful blogging and website tool WordPress.

Whilst the deal was concluded for an undisclosed amount we can be sure it involved some seriously big numbers. So what is WooCommerce? Here’s Fin24:

WooCommerce is a WordPress plugin that that helps users more easily set up e-commerce sites. [Automattic CEO] Mullenweg says that WooCommerce has over 7.5 million downloads, over one million active installs and powers 650 000 online storefronts.

WooCommerce is also linked to WooThemes, which is a business that sells WordPress themes. WooThemes was started in 2007 by South Africans Adii Pienaar and Mark Forrester along with Norwegian Magnus Jepson.

Mullenweg heralded the deal as an indicator of the success of open source software:

For years, we’ve been working on democratising publishing, and today more people have independent sites built on open source software than ever before in the history of the web…

Now, we want to make it easy for anyone to sell online independently, without being locked into closed, centralised services — to enable freedom of livelihood along with freedom of expression.

Of course WooCommerce is only one part of the ever-expanding local startup market full of unique and innovative ideas. Take for example Cape Town startup OurHood, the country’s fastest growing private social network for neighbourhoods. Their success has seen them featured in a number of magazines, including sharing the limelight with Trevor Noah in the latest Fast Company.

Good work all round tech geniuses, you keep this up and we might have to scale back our jokes about your twirly mustaches and vintage bikes.

[source:fin24]