Let’s say you’ve started a company and lovingly named it Mable. You raised a cool $3M in funding. Would you do like one of the startups on this week’s list and launch on MeetMable.com, fork out $275,000 to purchase the exact-match Mable.com domain or maybe you opt to save yourself some dough and spend $9,888 on Mable.co?
And what would you do if both those domains were already off the market?
Let the domain-splaining begin.
Here’s this weeks list:
(more…)NameJet takes the top spot this week with the $68,495 sale of Kura.com. The domain name has been up for auction before if my memory serves me right but this is the first time it hit it’s reserve and changed hands. The Whois is under privacy so it isn’t clear who’s the new owner of the domain as of now.
Another notable sale was that of HeyMoney.com which sold for a cool $40,000 at Sedo. The buyer also acquired the new gTLD Hey.Money for $8,888 in the same week.
Here’s this weeks list:
(more…)You don’t need a great domain name to raise money for a startup. As this week’s list shows, you don’t even need a decent or average domain name. You can raise millions and launch on a $10 domain name that was hand-registered the night before. It’s often only when a startup experiences significant traction and starts growing rapidly that they start to realize the importance of owning their exact-match brand .com domain name. The downside of this approach is that the price of their desired domain name has gone up significantly or worse, the domain name is off the market forever.
Here’s your list:
(more…)This year marked the biggest year in funding for artificial intelligence ventures yet. According to a report by CB Insights, the second quarter of 2019 saw a record of $7.4 billion invested in AI startups so it is no surprise really that AI-related domain names often make it into the chart. The top-grossing sale is for AITimes.com which sold for a cool $46,000 at Sedo. The domain name does not resolve at this moment and the recently updated Whois details show a Korean-based registrant as the owner.
Here’s this weeks list:
(more…)Last week, a cool $728M in capital was raised by 158 new startup companies. They all need a domain name and an increasing number of them is starting out with a non-com these days. .Ai, .Io and .Co remain popular choices among today’s startups and just like a couple of years, there’s a very small percentage that opts for a “new” extension such as .health, .bio or .tech
Companies that caught my attention with their domain name were Los-Angeles based Landline which enables airlines to offer their customers seamless connections to ground transportation. It looks like the company used to operate from LandlineCo.com and recently managed to upgrade to their exact-match Landline.com domain name. DomainIQ shows that the domain name was previously owned by Icapital Holdings, a company that owns a number of premium domain names.
Another company that cleverly acquired its exact-match .com is Skew. A fintech startup that aims to bring institutional-grade data analytics to the digital asset space. Elliot over at DomainInvesting.com has more background on the domain acquisition and the price here.
Last up, there’s Vested. A startup from Boston that wants to make companies, founders, and investors more fair and transparent with their equity towards employees. They launch with what I consider the second-best option domain option when the exact-match .com is out of reach, Vested.co
Here’s this weeks list:
(more…)It was another juicy week for brandable domain name sales with more than 10 sales reported in the five-figure range. The top-grossing sale was reported by domain name investor AbdulBasit who moved DarkWallet.com via Afternic for $25,000. He shares some more details about this and another recent sale he closed on his blog here.
Dark Wallet is a cryptocurrency term for an open-source bitcoin platform designed for the sole purpose of protecting users’ privacy.
Here’s this weeks list:
(more…)September is usually a great month for domain name sales and this year is no exception to that rule. Last week we saw a whopping twelve five-figure brandable domain name sales reported. The top reported sale is that of DynamicInsight.com which sold at DomainMarket.com for a cool $28,500. The buyer is a German computer software startup. According to Mike Mann his Twitter the domain name was purchased in 2011 for $354.
Zeda.com was an expired domain and sold at GoDaddy Auctions for what I consider to be near end-user pricing. It’s not clear if the domain name has been paid for yet as the Whois is currently still showing Afternic as the owner.
Here’s this weeks list:
(more…)Back in January 2015, shortly after starting this blog, I decided it would be a good idea to publish a weekly list of recently funded startups and their domain names. You can find the very first list I published here and together with the help of Candace Cook we published almost 160 lists, covering and analyzing more than 10,000 startups and their domain names.
The series became a weekly favorite for many readers but it took many hours for us to research and compile the list and then publish it so we stopped publishing the list 4 years later, in January 2018.
Thanks to some recent updates to Crunchbase’s Pro subscription I am now able to export a list of data in minutes compared to hours it used to take to do this manually which means I am bringing this weekly series back to the blog.
Here’s this weeks list:
(more…)I want to give a quick shout out to our latest sponsor, the original brandable domain name marketplace: BrandBucket. They recently acquired competitor BrandRoot who had been advertising with DNgeek for several years and BrandBucket was happy to continue to do so after the acquisition. I’ve been following the company since I started investing in domain names back in 2013 and doing so definitely contributed to me taking an interest in the brandable domain name category.
The company’s founder Margot Bushnaq can be credited with pioneering the now popular concept of presenting a domain name as a “brand in a box”, complete with a professional logo and creative description, helping a visitor to envision a brand more easily.
Here’s this weeks list:
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