A retail technology company called GetUpside, which offers consumers cashback for purchases at retailers, announced it rebranded following a large Series D round of funding. The company shortened its brand name to Upside and acquired its brand match upside.com domain name.
There’s only upside for users, merchants, and our communities – and now we have a name to match! We’ve also completed our Series D fundraising round led by @generalcatalyst. Read more in our CEO’s post: https://t.co/xSJ4CxQgvL pic.twitter.com/HsXnQoT3T2
— Upside (@upside) April 26, 2022
According to the blog post announcing the rebrand and funding round, Upside has achieved unicorn status with a $1.5 billion valuation.
In a LinkedIn post in August of 2021, the CEO of a business travel company called Upside announced his company was shutting down due to the pandemic. This business travel company operated on its brand match Upside.com domain name. While this news was undoubtedly difficult for the company, its employees, and its investors, the retail technology company called GetUpside saw an opportunity for its business.
From what I can see using the Whois History tool at DomainTools, it appears Upside.com changed hands in late 2021. An archived Whois record from December 2, 2021 shows Upside.com was registered to Escrow.com. The domain name later transferred to Amazon’s domain registrar under Whois privacy. My guess is the current registrant acquired the domain name using Escrow.com’s concierge service.
Although the business travel service shut down, I would imagine it (or its creditors) received a substantial amount of money for the Upside.com domain name. As we’ve seen plenty of times with a generic domain name like Upside.com, one business shutting down can open the door for another business to get a major domain name upgrade.
Thanks to George Kirikos and Dommunity for bringing this to my attention.
