NFT company Novel acquired Novel.com before raising $6 million

This company bought instant credibility with a premium domain purchase.

The NFT space has cemented a place in the public consciousness over the past 12 months. Thanks to the mainstream success of projects such as Bored Ape Yacht Club and Coinbase’s foray into NFTs, there’s a broader understanding of non-fungible tokens.

Mainstream attention demands new technology to make NFTs more accessible to the general public. An NFT-related company that has positioned itself to appeal to a mass market is Novel, which has been making early strides with an ultra-premium domain.

Describing itself as “the Shopify for NFTs,” Novel aims to allow creators and store owners to make and sell their own NFTs with no coding needed.

Founded in October 2021, this New York-based company has worked behind the scenes to develop an innovative product that takes advantage of the mass interest in NFTs.

It developed its first product, a Shopify plugin, for mass-market appeal. (Novel is now competing directly with Shopify, which launched its own NFT beta program.)

Still in its early days, Novel has secured significant funding. According to Crunchbase, Novel raised $6 million in a seed funding round that values the company at $21 million.

Before revealing this funding round, Novel made a savvy domain name upgrade.

Yes, Novel acquired Novel.com, upgrading from its original domain, Novel.shop. It looks as though the company began using Novel.com in late February 2022.

Novel.com is currently under Whois privacy protection at GoDaddy, so it’s unclear whether the company acquired the name outright or purchased it on a lease-to-own basis.

Looking at Archive.org, little can be discerned from its immediate history. The Archive.org Wayback Machine hasn’t crawled Novel.com since 2018, when it was forwarding to a default GoDaddy landing page.

For its new owners, Novel.com represents a huge upgrade. As a company offering a product that it hopes to be adopted by an audience wider than NFT natives, it makes perfect sense to operate on a valuable .com domain. The fact that its .com domain is Novel.com helps build credibility and trust in this young brand.