7 Domain Name Upgrades Revealed in June 2022

In June, startups and established companies alike continued to secure domain name upgrades, moving to premium .com domain names. This edition of Domain Upgrade features a $90,000 domain purchase, a couple of early upgrades for young startups, and an existing company launching a new service on a premium domain.

Knowledgebase.com

LiveChat Inc. knows the potency of a premium domain name. The company operates three platforms on premium domains; LiveChat.com, ChatBot.com, and HelpDesk.com. These thriving businesses have helped LiveChat become a successful, publicly-traded software company, with over 28,000 paid customers using its services.

Aside from the three aforementioned platforms, LiveChat also operates Knowledgebase, a service designed to guide and educate customers with the help of an advanced knowledge base.

Despite owning three premium domain names already, the company could only secure Knowledgebase.ai for its knowledge base project.

In June, LiveChat managed to acquire Knowledgebase.com through the Sedo domain marketplace for a fee of $90,000.

Knowledgebase is a generic term and a category-defining domain name. Acquiring Knowledgebase.com for $90,000 is a savvy move for the experienced company.

Electra.com

This is a domain name I mentioned on the first episode of Off the Market Forever, my new DomainSherpa show hosted alongside MediaOptions Sr. Broker Chris Zuiker. The company is one to watch for the future, but its domain choice is interesting.

From what I can tell, Electra is a newly formed entity with an aim to slash carbon emissions on the US electrical grid by 2030. The company decided to acquire Electra.co in a $50,000 deal earlier this year.

In June, Electra managed to secure an upgrade in the form of Electra.com. This is a truly special domain name, sold from General Electric’s portfolio of domains for an undisclosed fee.

It’s an incredible coup for Electra, which shares its brand name with dozens of other companies that would have liked to secure the domain for themselves.

Spade.com

Fintech company Spade recently raised $6.1 million in funding for its transaction enrichment API business. Founded in late 2020, Spade is supported by Gradient Ventures, Y Combinator, and The Fund.

Since launching, Spade has operated on Spade.dev, the Google-owned domain extension that has had some traction with small development companies.

I need to discuss the domain I own!

Spade recently made a sizable upgrade, securing a domain that matches their ambition. That domain name is Spade.com, acquired for an undisclosed fee in June 2022. The upgrade was first spotted by researcher Jamie Zoch.

Aide.com

A new customer support company has secured an early domain name upgrade in the form of Aide.com before it has left its Alpha testing phase.

Aide was incorporated in late 2020 and has been developing its suite of products ever since under the direction of co-founders James Hill-Khurana and Ziyad Basheer. The company aims to use machine intelligence to help customer support agents reduce their workload.

According to the company, Aide uses AI-generated responses and suggestions to cut down input from customer service agents by as much as 80%.

Until now, Aide has been operating on Aide.app, but the company recently secured Aide.com.

Fruitful.com

I need to buy a new domain!

Fruitful, a financial wellness startup, has a strange history with domain names. The company, founded in 2021, was first branded as Branch. Impressively, Branch secured the Branch.com domain name but that domain moved into the possession of Branch Financial Inc., itself upgrading from OurBranch.com to Branch.com.

Branch, the new startup, then rebranded to Fruitful, operating on the Fruitful.co domain name. The company launched out of stealth mode using Fruitful.co and announced that it had raised a total of $37 million, including a $25 million Series A funding round.

The company, which can obviously appreciate the necessity of a good domain name due to its history with Branch.com, has now secured Fruitful.com after the domain moved to a privacy-protected Google account at the end of June 2022.

Distributed.com

The term “distributed” is popular among the blockchain and Web3 industries, so it’s no surprise that the Distributed.com domain used to be the home of a news site covering blockchain and cryptocurrency in particular.

However, in June, a London-based company secured Distributed.com, upgrading from Distributed.co in the process. The .co extension seems to be a temporary destination for many brands, using it until it’s feasible to acquire the .com equivalent.

Distributed’s acquisition of Distributed.com came months after it secured £30 million ($36.5 million) in funding from telecommunications giant BT. The company also announced an £8 million ($9.6 million) venture funding round weeks after acquiring Distributed.com.

The proximity of Distributed’s funding is hard to ignore here and likely played an influence on Distributed’s ability to secure the Distributed.com domain name.

Exec.com

This isn’t strictly an upgrade, but an existing company has secured this ultra-premium domain to expand its product offering.

Regular readers of the MediaOptions blog may be familiar with Placement, a 2019 startup that helps to speed up a job search. I interviewed Sean Linehan, a co-founder of Placement, in 2021 to chat about the company’s domain name, Placement.com, for my ongoing On the Record series.

Placement has added another domain name to its portfolio in the form of Exec.com, a common abbreviation for “executive”. The acquisition was confirmed to me by Linahan.

The development of Exec.com is still in its early days, but it will become the home of a Placement’s B2B coaching service.