A company called ASI announced a $325 million Series C funding round this week at a $3 billion valuation. The company recently acquired the valuable ASI.com domain name.

ASI was originally known as Airspace Intelligence, and it has operated on the hyphenated Airspace-Intelligence.com domain name. It has used ASI as an abbreviated name for quite some time and has increasingly transitioned its public-facing branding to ASI. The company’s website and its most recent news releases now prominently use the ASI branding, as does its social media presence and references.

I use a handful of domain investing tools on a daily basis. The primary purpose is evaluating domain names I want to buy in auction, but I also use some of these tools to price my own domain names and submit educated offers on domain names I want to buy. I also use some of these tools to do background research for domain name related articles on my blog.

About half of the tools I use every day are available for anyone to use for free. Some offer paid account options as well, but have free versions that come with limits on searches and functionality. Other tools are paid and have different fee structures, primarily based on usage and the tools that are used on the platform. One tool I use is paid, but I have been given a journalist account that allows me to use it for research at no cost.

Here is a list of the domain tools I use just about every day:

Over the weekend, Paul Graham, Founder of the Y Combinator startup accelerator, shared his thoughts upon hearing about a startup’s $250,000 domain name acquisition:

A recent YC startup spent 250k on a domain. I was slightly shocked. But when I asked how much they raised after YC, the answer was 6.5m. So 1/26 of their round. This is the time we live in; one shocking number counterbalances the other.

— Paul Graham (@paulg) August 1, 2026

The startup founder, Arlan Rakhmetzhanov, out himself as the $250,000 buyer of Folk.com. I would agree with Arlan’s assessment that it was a good deal for his company, as Folk.com is a short and meaningful one word .com domain name. It was also an exceptional domain name upgrade over GetFolk.app.

There are many reasons for why a company will drop a chunk of change on a domain name. The Founder of an AI sales tool called ZipChat shared that his company spent $40,000 to acquire ZipChat.com in order to eliminate friction. The business uses ZipChat.ai for its website.

💬 ZipChat․com Domain Acquired By Ruslan For $40,000 https://t.co/PWW2cJ0xqT

— ARIYAS (@domainretail) July 27, 2026

Obviously, I think this domain name acquisition was smart.

It appears that OpenAI has acquired the GPT.com domain name. If you visit GPT.com, you will be forwarded to ChatGPT.com. OpenAI previously acquired Chat.com last year, and that domain name also forwards to the ChatGPT website. GPT is an acronym for Generative Pre-trained Transformer.

GPT.com is now registered to DNStination Inc. at corporate domain registrar, MarkMonitor. DNStination is the MarkMonitor Whois privacy service. This means I can’t conclusively say the domain name is owned by OpenAI, but it would be peculiar for a MarkMonitor client to acquire a domain name like this and forward it to another company’s website. Both Chat.com and OpenAI.com are also registered at MarkMonitor, but neither of those domain names use Whois privacy.