Brilliant, Startup with a .Tech Domain Name, Raises $21m

According to a report in the Wall Street Journal, which was amplified on Techmeme this afternoon, a company called Brilliant “picked up a $21 million Series A round of funding led by August Capital.” When I saw the name of the company, I was curious about the domain name it is using because I know the company doesn’t own Brilliant.com.

I did a Google search for “Brilliant smart home,” and I saw that the company is using the Brilliant.tech domain name for its website. Off the top of my head, I can’t recall other companies operating on a .Tech domain name that have received this much funding. I think it illustrates that a company doesn’t need to have the exact match .com domain name to be successful.

One thing that might hurt a company like Brilliant is that the Wall Street Journal didn’t link out to Brilliant’s website, and I presume that will be the case with other publications. The news likely caused a traffic spike to Brilliant.com because people tend to assume that companies own the exact match .com domain name of their brand name. As a company in the tech space, Brilliant’s audience may know better to just assume that it has the .com domain name, but the general public tends to be .com centric. Unfortunately, Brilliant doesn’t own BrilliantTech.com, which was registered in 2006.

Brilliant.com is a domain name that is owned and used by a company called Brilliant Systems. In my opinion, the Brilliant.com domain name alone is worth six figures if the owner would even consider selling it for market value. This doesn’t consider any goodwill, costs of changes to marketing materials, or other website changes that would be required if the domain name were to be sold. It does not look like Brilliant Systems owns BrilliantSystems.com, so it couldn’t even easily move to the exact match domain name if it were willing to do a deal. Of course, Brilliant, the smart home control company, might not even have an interest in spending money to acquire the Brilliant.com domain name.

I will be curious to see if the recently funded company tries to acquire the Brilliant.com domain name. I would love to own Brilliant.com, but my budget would only be mid-5 figures for it, and I am sure that would not be enough to get a deal done.