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Former Bitcoin.com CEO launches new venture at Hi.com

by — Domain Sales 1 Comment

This new financial company uses a killer domain to garner credibility.

Logo for hi has the word high is cursive, lowercase h and i, with blue hues.

Hi. Aside from being the abbreviation for Hawaii, it’s one of the most common informal greetings in the English language.

As it turns out, Hi is also a handy brand name. According to LinkedIn, several thousand companies use “Hi” as a part of their listed names. These include an aviation company, a travel platform, and an insurance company.

A newer company is branding purely around the two-letter Hi, though.

Hi, a financial services platform, was founded in 2020 and first came to my attention thanks to Crunchbase highlighting the company’s recent seed funding round.

Currently in private beta, Hi is a blockchain-based banking service that aims to provide a reimagined financial service suite to its customers. Its unconventional take on banking means that, according to Hi, users will soon be able to send money via popular messaging apps.

Financial institutions need to convey trust to potential customers, which can be difficult for a brand new company. Something that Hi has done to emanate trust, longevity, and integrity, is to launch on the perfect domain name.

Yes, Hi operates on the two-letter domain, Hi.com.

Hi.com is a powerful domain, but then again, Hi’s co-founders are no strangers to using premium domains. Stefan Rüst is the former CEO of Bitcoin.com, and Sean Rach is the former CMO of Crypto.com, a domain reportedly acquired for $12 million.

Hi.com itself may have had a 7 figure sale in its history.

In a January 2019 DNJournal article, Ron Jackson mentioned that: “I’ve learned (and seen documentation proving) that MavenDomains.com has brokered a $2.2 million dollar sale of another very nice 2-letter .com.”

According to Archive.org, Hi.com was listed for sale with brokerage company MavenDomains.com until late in 2018, when the name started to redirect to the website of Hi Inc., a Hong Kong-based travel company that closed its doors in August 2019.

It’s unclear whether the financial platform Hi, also based in Hong Kong, acquired the Hi.com domain outright or whether another arrangement has allowed Hi to use the name from launch.

What is clear is that the Hi.com domain has given the team the perfect digital podium to publicize its not-for-profit financial service products.

Already, after only a couple of months, Hi announced that it has surpassed 500,000 members of its private beta program.

Remote becomes a Unicorn after raising $150 million using Remote.com

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The newest Unicorn built its business on a great domain name.

Logo for Remote.com shows purple stylized image and the word remote in black letters

Remote working has become the norm for much of the world thanks to COVID-19, and it looks like it’s here to stay. The Conference Board estimates that 20%-30% of people who had office jobs will continue to work remotely.

That suggests that in the future, location will be less of a determining factor for hiring candidates. This could even include hiring employees from abroad.

Employing anyone from a different country can be difficult due to HR, legal, and financial compliance issues. One company is looking to make the international hiring process much easier.

Remote was founded in early 2019 to provide payroll and compliance services to international teams. What is striking from a domain name perspective is that the company owns Remote.com. To complete its digital branding, Remote also operates on @Remote on Twitter and Instagram.

Remote.com was previously developed as a remote job board by entrepreneur Nick Macario, but the domain name and other assets were taken over by Job van der Voort, a former GitHub employee.

Under Job van der Voort, Remote has become a leading international employment compliance service used by Loom, GitLab, and Mural. Practicing what it preaches, Remote’s own team now spans 47 countries.

On July 13th, 2021, Remote announced that it had raised $150 million in Series B funding at a valuation of over $1 billion, putting the company into the exclusive Unicorn club. To date, Remote’s total funding stands at $196 million.

Last year, far before Remote’s Unicorn status was confirmed, I chatted to Job van der Voort in an interview published at Media Options. Job’s love of the Remote.com domain name was evident:

Remote.com seemed like the best possible domain for our goals. That was the only thing that mattered. I’m a strong believer in clarity in design and language, so when I decided to address remote work, Remote.com seemed like the best possible domain. Nothing is simpler for us than Remote.com.

Remote has used Remote.com since the company started. Acquiring the exact-match, single-word .com before launching is a feat that few startups achieve, but securing its digital identity so early has allowed Remote to become a dominant figure in the remote working industry. After all, it’s hard to ignore a company using an ultra-premium .com.

Titan asset management acquires Titan.com

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This investment app made a big investment of its own.

the word "domain upgrade" on a red backgrounder, black arrow pointing upward inside a circle

Titan, an asset management company, has acquired a valuable asset of its own.

Founded in 2018, Titan is a New York-based fintech setup that calls itself a world-class hedge fund in your pocket. The company touts itself as an investment firm for everyday people that Wall Street might otherwise ignore.

According to its website, Titan has attracted 25,000 clients in its first 3 years in business and now manages $500 million worth of investments for those clients. The early momentum from Titan also caught the eye of the venture capitalists.

The company raised $2.5 million in seed funding in 2018, followed by a $12.5 million Series A round in February 2021. Both rounds featured funding from startup incubator Y Combinator.

With that Series A money in the bank, Titan made a significant upgrade. The company transitioned from a frankly confusing domain name to a noticeable, ultra-premium .com.

Up until early July, Titan used and promoted the domain Titanvest.com. No, that’s not TitanInvest.com, which is owned by a Danish company. Titanvest.com. The “Titan” keyword is competitive, with DotDB revealing that “Titan” is registered in 353 different extensions and is used in over 52,000 other domain names.

While it is a competitive keyword with possibly limited domain options for a new startup, Titanvest.com remains a baffling choice for a domain name for a consumer-facing financial company.

Perhaps Titan’s founders shared this view, as Titan has quietly acquired the incredible Titan.com domain. According to WHOIS history, this purchase may have occurred around May 23rd, 2021, 3 months after Titan’s Series A funding round.

Titan.com was acquired from Nationwide Mutual Insurance, a Fortune 500 company that posted $49.3 billion in revenue in 2019. DotWeekly founder Jamie Zoch noted the movement via Twitter.

The purchase of Titan.com and the transition to that domain comes as Titan is due to release its first crypto asset management offering, providing an actively managed crypto strategy for US investors.

As a consumer-facing company in the financial industry, switching from Titanvest.com to Titan.com makes a lot of sense for Titan.

Trust is a crucial part of finance, and as a service that is only accessible online, Titan’s domain name represents the first interaction that many customers have with the company. Owning Titan.com allows Titan to immediately present a sense of trust and longevity to its potential clients.

A young company moves from RibbonExperiences.com to Ribbon.com

by — Domain Sales 1 Comment

This newish startup made a big domain upgrade.

Screenshot of Ribbon.com showing a woman doing exercise

Ribbon upgraded its domain to Ribbon.com.

Founded in 2020, Ribbon is an online platform for live and recorded events that can integrate with services such as Zoom, while also offering email marketing solutions. In essence, it’s billed as a one-stop-shop for yoga studios, creators, and possibly even influencers.

As with many recently formed companies, Ribbon initially didn’t focus much attention on its domain name, opting to brand around WithRibbon.com before switching to RibbonExperiences.com.

Both of these names are what I would call stopgap names, both cheap to acquire and adequate for a small startup until proof of concept, funding, or recurring revenue makes acquiring the company’s exact-match .com more viable.

It seems that such an acquisition was possible as Ribbon has now transitioned from RibbonExperiences.com to the succinct Ribbon.com.

Jamie Zoch first spotted the acquisition of Ribbon.com on Twitter:

According to WHOIS, the name switched accounts at Uniregistry around June 21st, 2021. Before that, the domain name was registered to Next Navigation Pty. Ltd. of Australia. That company is also listed as the registrant for domain names such as Moose.com, Tape.com, and Herbal.com, alongside many other valuable domain names.

As of writing, it is unclear whether Ribbon bought Ribbon.com outright or whether this was a lease-to-own deal. An email sent to Next Navigation Pty. Ltd. wasn’t responded to.

Regardless, acquiring a one-word .com domain name after just a year in business is an impressive feat that many founders dream of but most never achieve. The purchase shows intent and ambition from Ribbon and gives the company a perfect launchpad for its future.

Ribbon’s efforts to brand around the common word ribbon is part of a general trend that Crunchbase commented on in 2020 in a blog post entitled “Startup Names Are Still Getting Less Silly.” The article notes a continuing trend of companies branding around single words, citing numerous examples.

A testament to the popularity of ribbon as a brand name is evident at Crunchbase, where 40 company names contain the word ribbon.

It’s surprising that Ribbon.com hasn’t been snapped up before now by another company named Ribbon. Especially considering one of those companies, Ribbon Home, has raised $555 million in funding since launching in 2017.

Building a business on system.com

by — Domain Sales 0 Comments

This data company uses a great domain name.

screenshot of system.com

Company database Crunchbase is a resource I use on a daily basis to find information about domain names and the companies using them. After years of using the service, there are few companies using a premium domain name that I haven’t at least noted.

However, one company that I haven’t come across on Crunchbase before is System, a software company that caught my eye recently after it announced a $12,250,000 Series A funding round.

To me, what is more noteworthy than the Series A funding figure is the company’s domain name, System.com. Originally registered in 1995, System.com represents one of the best one-word .com domains in existence, and likely a domain name that took great effort to acquire.

System was founded by scientist and entrepreneur Adam Bly, an entrepreneur with a wealth of career experience behind him already thanks to the creation of his own successful data analytics company, Seed Scientific, followed by a stint as Spotify’s VP of Data.

While a request for information was ignored, I believe that System has existed behind the scenes for several years, but it has only recently been unveiled to the public. It certainly seems as though Bly and his team acquired System.com well in advance of the company’s public launch.

According to WHOIS history, the domain moved to Google’s registrar under WHOIS privacy protection in mid-2018 and then moved to Amazon’s registrar in early 2019. Archive.org reveals that System.com held a “coming soon” page until mid-2020 when a beta version of System appeared, suggesting that Bly acquired the name while the company was very much in stealth mode.

The acquisition of premium domains by companies in stealth mode is something that does happen often, especially if that stealth company has a funding source and has a specific need to own its exact-match .com before launching to the public.

There is no doubt that System.com is a valuable domain, and it’s an asset to the company that uses it, but is it intrinsic to System’s day-to-day activities? As of writing, System.com hosts a site detailing System’s product offering with a prompt for interested users to sign up for its service. System.com, then, is the company’s shop front.

However, Bly revealed in an Instagram interview (5:57) that later this year, System.com will become even more important to the company as it offers users a search functionality so that visitors can use System.com as a search engine for data.

Bly and the System team showed excellent foresight in securing System.com before launching.

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