The battle to control the future of messaging just escalated in a major way. Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com and a growing portfolio of web services, has acquired Beeper, the upstart app trying to unify all your messaging inboxes into one, for $125 million.

The deal, which closed last week and was announced officially on Tuesday, April 9th, marks a fascinating juncture for both companies involved. For Beeper, it punctuates a rollercoaster few months that saw the small startup briefly poke the bear that is Apple before backing down from its provocative Beeper Mini app that allowed Android users to send and receive iMessages.

But Beeper’s CEO Eric Migicovsky insists the acquisition by Automattic isn’t an admission of defeat or inability to execute Beeper’s ambitious vision.

“Having worked on this for three and a half years, and seeing how difficult it is to bring something like this to life, we’ve realized we need to know who our friends are in this game,” Migicovsky said. “Automattic is a powerful, long-time advocate for open software, was an early investor in Beeper, and has a good reputation as a steward of its acquisitions. To me, it felt like the right place to land.”

For Automattic’s part, the acquisition doubles down on CEO Matt Mullenweg’s belief that messaging represents the next frontier for his open web company to tackle. In recent months, Mullenweg has been vocal about his desire to promote “private, free, encrypted, open-source communication” which he views as “a fundamental human right.”

Automattic made its first messaging move last October by acquiring Texts, Beeper’s closest competitor, for $50 million. At the time, Mullenweg praised Beeper’s approach while critiquing its reliance on storing and decrypting some user messages – something Beeper has since improved upon.

“The big tech folks are going to want to shut this down,” Mullenweg presciently warned of unified messaging apps like Beeper, “and I think the best argument they’ll have is that it’s breaking security.”

With the Beeper deal, Automattic is going all-in on unified cross-platform messaging, while putting its considerable resources and philosophical weight behind the open-source Matrix protocol that Beeper relies upon.

Migicovsky, who will take over as Automattic’s Head of Messaging, frames the combined company’s mission as nothing less than a paradigm shift in how we communicate online.

“Our vision is to leverage these connections that we have to other companies and other networks, but over time, migrate people and give them an opportunity to move to an open standard for messaging,” he says.

First, the newly enlarged team’s focus will be getting the Beeper app, now open to all after operating under a waitlist, fully functional across platforms. Android is currently the most advanced, with work remaining to catch up iOS, web, and desktop clients to parity.

“We got a hell of a lot of work ahead of us,” Migicovsky acknowledges. “But I am quite excited about it.”

If Automattic and Beeper succeed, Migicovsky’s aspiration of rendering platform-exclusive messaging protocols like iMessage obsolete may well be realized. No blue or green bubbles – just an open messaging landscape shaped by an unlikely union of a plucky startup and open web Goliath.