Yesterday morning, CrunchBase reported that Attend.com raised $5.6 million in Series A funding. Attend.com was founded in 2013 with goal of creating web and mobile event management software to serve the multi-billion dollar market for event management.
Boston based .406 Ventures played a key role incubating and providing seed funding for the launch of the company. .406 Ventures provided the vast majority of the Series A funding along with additional financing from Comerica Bank. Matt Engel, the CEO for Attend.com, led the financing effort for Attend.com
Attend.com was established in 2013 as Attendware, and it originally used Attendware.com for its business. It appears that the Attend.com domain name was privately acquired in early 2014. Although I could not find a public record of its sale, my guess is that it cost into the 6 figures to acquire Attend.com. I don’t personally know the former owner of Attend.com, but I have seen his Whois information on some exceptional domain names.
In doing my  research about Attend.com, I noticed that someone with significant domain industry experience helped the company acquire the Attend.com domain name. Jeff Bennett, the Founder and former President of NameMedia, is involved in the management of Attend.com as a member of its Board of Directors. Jeff has always believed in the power of descriptive domains and has played the role of matchmaker for these names with several emerging companies including Attend.com, TechStars.com, Swap.com, FanManager.com, Adtuitive.com, GlobalPost.com, HealthGraph.com and many others.
The event industry is competitive, and the event management software space has quite a few strong companies operating in it. I am sure that having a memorable name like Attend.com is helpful in its endeavors. Attend.com as a brand is far superior to Attendware, and I think it was a smart move to acquire this domain name while the company was still in it’s early stage.
Don’t you own some event domains?
Yes, I own several, including EventManagement.com and EventPlanner.com.
This news speaks well for event industry and our own Attend.events. Hey isn’t this eventsindustrynews 😉
Have met Jeff and other Name Media guys. Good people.
Thanks Scott. Descriptive domains are very important in the brand building process. The event industry is very large. Lots of opportunities here for sure.