adii

Adii Pienaar, commonly known simply as Adii, is a South African entrepreneur and software developer who co-founded WooThemes, a company that produced WordPress themes and related products. He started WooThemes in 2008 alongside Mark Forrester and Magnus Jepson to serve the growing WordPress ecosystem with premium themes and plugins.

WooThemes is best known for developing WooCommerce, an open-source e-commerce plugin for WordPress released in 2011. WooCommerce expanded WordPress into a widely used platform for online stores and contributed to the growth of a robust ecosystem of themes and extensions. In 2015, Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, acquired WooCommerce and integrated it into its product lineup.

Following the acquisition, Adii pursued other ventures in technology and entrepreneurship, taking on roles in product leadership, mentoring, and investment. He has participated in discussions about open-source software models, community-driven development, and the evolution of the WordPress ecosystem, contributing to the broader dialogue around the commercialization of open-source projects.

Adii’s work is often cited in the context of WordPress’s growth and the emergence of plugin and theme marketplaces as drivers of small-business digital transformation. His name is associated with early product development that helped popularize WordPress-based e-commerce solutions and demonstrated a pathway from open-source software to commercially supported products.