Whenever I see a TechCrunch tweet mentioning a large fundraising round for a company with a short and/or generic-ish brand name, I immediately focus on the domain name used by the company. This morning, TechCrunch published an article about a company called Ada, which announced a $44 million Series B funding round:
Ada raises $44M Series B to improve its chatbot customer service platform https://t.co/7Ui4sbBdpz by @mjburnsy pic.twitter.com/555yJDktNg
— TechCrunch (@TechCrunch) March 19, 2020
The company’s Crunchbase profile shows that it had previously raised $16.6 million in funding, so it would appear that this company has now raised over $60 million in total funding to date.
A quick glance at the article showed that Ada operates on the Ada.Support domain name. Ada also owns the AdaSupport.com domain name, and the company forwards the .com to the .Support domain name. My guess is that this was done because of the company’s branding of Ada rather than Ada Support.
Notably, on the CB profile page, the company is called Ada Support, but on its website, it is referred to as Ada. In looking at Archive.org, this would appear to be a branding change as the company was called Ada Support in the past.
Ada.com is owned by a different company, also called Ada, which “is a global health company.” Because of the differences in offerings, the chatbot company probably doesn’t have to worry all that much about customer confusion over the two brands.
