Did Apple Sell Grail.com?

Apple owns quite a few valuable keyword .com domain names that I have seen in many Whois look ups. The company owns great domain names like Apple.com (obviously), Me.com, Mac.com, Newton.com, Carbon.com, Next.com, and many others.

Based on a recent changed I detected with the help of DomainTools, it seems like Grail.com has changed hands. Up until August 23,  Grail.com was owned by Apple and registered at CSC. Within the last couple of days, the domain name  registration information went private, and it is now registered at Google Domains. Based on a biography page on RFX.com, it looks like Apple may have acquired Grail.com  in 2002 when “Apple Computer acquired the technologies belonging to Silicon Grail.” Grail.com has a creation date of October 20, 1991.

When I visited Grail.com, I was forwarded to GrailBio.com. According to its website, Grail has a very worthy mission that would likely help millions of people if it works: “The mission of Grail is to enable the early detection of cancer in asymptomatic individuals through a blood screen – with the goal of massively decreasing global cancer mortality by detection at a curable stage.”

According to CrunchBase, Grail has raised $100 million in funding as of earlier this year. Grail seems to have quite a few high powered investors and firms backing it, including Bill Gates, Bezos Expeditions, and Google Ventures. They could obviously afford to upgrade to Grail.com if Apple was willing to sell the domain name, although some startups aren’t interested in spending a significant sum of money to acquire a domain name.

I have no idea if Apple sold the domain name or if there is another type of deal in place. It is very likely that we will never know the exact terms of a deal that may be in place for Grail.com. I reached out to representatives from Grail to ask if they could share the price or other details about the acquisition, and I have not yet heard back (they are on California time though). If they are willing or able to comment on this domain name, I will update the article to add their comments.