One Clara upgrades to Clara.com while another misses out

The company that used clara.cc upgraded to .com.

First names are becoming more popular options as brand names. Earlier this year, Crunchbase identified first names as a trend in branding, citing successful companies like Mona, Marvin, or Otto. There’s also Alan, the unicorn digital health brand, and Jerry, the well-funded AI brand.

Here’s another example, and it shows how, when your name is common, you need to be the first to strike.

This month, a London-based company called Clara raised $3.5 million to add to its $2.1 million of existing funding. The legal services provider has been around since 2018, and with this funding, you might think that a domain name upgrade would be on the cards, which would see Clara moving from Clara.co to Clara.com.

But it’s too late. That company has been beaten to the punch by another Clara, an end-to-end spend management provider for companies in Latin America. This Clara has raised $158.5 million in funding since forming in 2020, including a $70 million Series B round closed in December 2021. In this instance, the brand name Clara is more likely to mean “clear” in Spanish.

The company has upgraded from Clara.cc to Clara.com and transitioned its website to its new domain.

Clara.com changed hands three years ago when domain investment portfolio Telepathy, Inc. acquired the name from its previous owner, a defunct startup.

According to Whois history, Clara purchased Clara.com earlier this year, with the domain moving from Dynadot to a privacy-protected GoDaddy account in February 2022.

Since Clara is a company targeting an international audience across much of South America, it makes perfect sense for the company to invest in its exact-match .com, the globally recognized gTLD.

Updates: Media Options brokered the deal. The domain was once defended in a UDRP.