The alternative meat company that acquired Simulate.com last year raised another round of funding.
The alternative food market is growing. More people around the world are transitioning from a meat-based diet to plant-based substitutes.
In the U.S. in 2019, meat alternatives accounted for $939 million in sales for the plant-based food market. While that number is dwarfed by the meat industry, it shows a healthy consumer interest, which is being capitalized on by several companies.
One such company is Simulate, a biotechnology company founded in 2018. Simulate recently announced that it closed a Series B funding round worth $50 million, adding to the $11 million previously raised by the New York-based startup.
Simulate started life as Nuggs. While it doesn’t seem to own Nuggs.com, relying on EatNuggs.com instead, the company made a notable domain name purchase when it announced its rebrand to Simulate.
Yes, Simulate acquired Simulate.com just before the company announced its rebrand from Nuggs to Simulate in July 2020.
As with many domain acquisitions by startups, the purchase coincided with the company completing a funding round. In this case, Simulate raised $4 million.
According to WHOIS history, Simulate completed the purchase of Simulate.com in March 2020, four months before the company announced its rebrand.
Simulate.com was sold by Future Media Architects Inc., a company that owns a highly sought-after portfolio of premium domains including Cool.com, Media.com, and AI.com.
While the price paid for Simulate.com was never revealed, we do know that domain brokers Saw.com facilitated the deal, thanks to a tweet from DomainInvesting.com’s Elliot Silver.
Since Simulate’s acquisition of Simulate.com, the domain has become the brand’s digital focal point, with Nuggs now transitioning from a brand name to a product name.
Simulate spends heavily on social media ads and influencer partnerships to promote its products, appealing to a mass market through memes and new-age advertising. Yet, the contact point for its direct-to-consumer division is its domain, Simulate.com, which hosts a website that’s more akin to a software startup than a plant-based food creator.
Simulate has done something that the other big plant-based manufacturers failed to do – acquire a one-word .COM. Impossible Foods missed out on Impossible.com, while Beyond uses BeyondMeat.com rather than Beyond.com.
MICHAEL DOONER says
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