newly funded

The only startup that launched with a premium .com this week is Choco, a young startup from Berlin with plenty of momentum that’s aiming to attract restaurants and suppliers. The company just raised a $33.5M funding round and aims to make ordering and communication with suppliers faster and simpler. A quick look at DomainIQ reveals that the Whois details of Choco.com last changed in July 2019, several months before the company secured it’s Series A investment.

Dash Living, a “Serviced Living Community” here in Hong Kong that raised $10M is operating from Dash.co. The company operates several serviced apartments, boutique hotels and co-living spaces around the city.

Here’s this weeks list:

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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.

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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.

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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

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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:

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This post covers new startups funded during Week 2 of 2018 (Jan 8th-14th).

Eighty eight (88) newly funded startups raised more than $647,041,138. The funding rounds was led by Blackfish, a Chinese  consumer finance platform, who raised $145M in Series A funding. Of the 88 startups, 62 of them chose to use a dot-com domain name; accounting for 70 % of companies on our list. Twenty two (22) startups chose to launch with a country code top level domain (ccTLD). And finally, we have one dot-net domain name; one dot-auto; one dot-investments; and one dot-ltd.

It was quite tough to find domain names to highlight. But, we’ll press on with RootCloud.com. Root Cloud is a Beijing-based cloud computing company, who may have only acquired the domain name two months ago. Although ‘root’ is not the first word one would think to combine with ‘cloud’, this domain works for the company as they seek to provide “tree root interconnection to empower industrial clouds.” Next up, we have FirstAgenda.com, belonging to a Danish-based company looking to end inefficient meetings by creating smarter meeting software. First Agenda definitely works well for a company providing meeting software as “first on the agenda” comes to mind immediately. Honestly, I’m not even sure that any software could end pointless meetings, but at least this company is trying to make the pointless meetings efficient.

Here is our list:

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This post covers new startups funded during Week 52 of 2017 (December 25th – 31st), and Week 1 of 2018 (January 1st -7th).

A whopping $2,173,997,144 in funding was raised by 102 startups on our list. Suning Finance,  one of the top leading financial groups in China, led the rounds by raising almost $827M in venture funding. Seventy four (74) of the 102 startups on this list chose to use a .com domain name, representing almost 72% of the list; a percentage greater than we’ve seen in past weeks. We have 1 .net and 1 .org domain each, while 24 startups chose a ccTLd. Two new gTLD domains also graced our list: 1 .events and 1 .tech.

First up, we’ll highlight the 20-year old one-word domain, Handful.com. Though not super premium, the domain is decent. Given the comparative prices of similar domains, I won’t be surprised if this company paid 4-5 figures to upgrade from their initial Handfulinc.com. The company, Handful, is an activewear company “that supports you grabbing life by the handful.” However, in my opinion, the correlation between the name ‘Handfu’l and activewear is a little blurred. Next up, we have Akiri.com. The name itself makes a really nice 5L brandable domain name. And, the company works on building trusted networks for health data.

Here is our list:

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Happy New Year! I didn’t post for the past two weeks as I went on vacation. The new year met my family and I on the sandy beaches of Aruba. We loved it! It’s a lovely place to visit. But, for this reason, this post will cover new startups funded during Week 51 of 2017 (December 18th – 24th).

More than 82 startups raised a sum greater than $551,659,726 in funding. The funding rounds was led by Niido, who raised $200M in venture funding. Niido by Airbnb is a brand of residential complexes that will be built as a result of a collaboration between Airbnb and a Florida-based development group. Of the 82 startups on today’s list, 54 of them chose to launch with a dot-com domain name, accounting for about 66%. Twenty (20) startups chose a ccTLd, while we have 1 dot-net, and 1 dot-org domain. As for new gTLDs, we have one domain each of the following: .bio, .care, .exchange, .marketing, .pro, and .solutions.

First up, we’ll highlight the 20-year old domain, EMQ.com. Wholesale, LLL.com domain names sell in the low to mid 5 figures; while retail they can go from mid 5 to low 6 figures. Although there is no recorded information about EMQ.com in Namebio.com, I won’t be surprised if the price paid for the domain fell somewhere in these ranges. EMQ is an app to make sending money internationally easier. Next up, we have ScaleFast.com. This verb-adjective combination makes a decent brandable. ScaleFast provides ecommerce solutions that allow businesses to grow globally. Finally, we have OutboundWorks.com, a domain that was first registered in 2017. Simply put, OutboundWorks provides outbound solutions for sales teams. 

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More than 108 startups raised north of $762,327,614 in funding last week. Chinese AI chip maker, Think Force, led the funding round by raising just over $68M in Series A funding. Eighty (80) of the 108 startups on our list chose to launch with dot-com domain names, 2 startups chose dot-net domain names, while we have 1 dot-org domain. Moreover, 21 companies launched with a ccTLD, and we have four ngTLD domains; a dot-farm, a dot-systems, a dot-tech, and a dot-works.

By far the best domain on this week’s list is Loot.com, belonging to a British-based online publications company. The domain has a 1997 creation date, and might have been purchased by the current company in 2016. Next up, we have Descript.com, which definitely isn’t the greatest single word dot-com domain, but it works for the company. Descript is an audio processing platform. This is another domain that may have been acquired by the company’s founder in 2016.  Finally, we have Friss.com, which sold for $10K on Uniregistry back in July. For some reason, this 5L domain name attracted me. And although the word has no relationship with any English words (other than being one letter away from ‘frisk’), the word does have some meaning in some western European languages. Since the Dutch-based “fraud, risk and compliance” company just raised a cool €15M in Series A funding, I’d say that they bought their matching dot-com domain for a very nice price.

Happy Holidays Everyone!

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At least 85 startups raised more than $599,349,113 in funding last week. Altus Power raised a signifiant $150M in Venture funding. As the name suggests, the company is an energy company, but with a specific focus on renewable energy and solar power projects. Surprisingly, of the 84 startups, only 48 of the companies launched with a dot-com domain name, that is only 57%.  Thirty two (32) startups launched with a ccTLD, and we have one domain each of the following categories: dot-biz, dot-org, dot-car, dot-tech.

We’ve finally stumbled upon a week with multiple startups using single word dot-com domain names. Granted, they are not the most popular single words on the block, but we’ll take it. First up, we have Cedar.com, a domain first registered in 1997, and is being used by the company, Cedar, who helps hospital systems improve their patient payment/billing systems. Next up, we have Burrow.com, another well-aged domain with a 1996 creation date. Burrow is an innovative couch company, setting trends for creating customizable couches that are delivered directly to homes. The company seemed to have purchased the domain in the last 1-3 years. Finally, we have Inflect.com, which is a “platform for buying and selling internet infrastructure.”

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