Kin Secured Kin.com via Microsoft

I saw a VentureBeat article shared via Twitter about a company called Kin announcing a $47 million round of funding. The company has now raised “over $60 million” in funding. After clicking through to the article, I could see that this insurance startup was using the Kin.com domain name.

This three letter, one word .com domain name is undoubtedly valuable, and I did some research to see if I could learn more about how the company was able to acquire it. At the time of publication, the domain name is privately registered, so I can’t confirm that Kin is the registrant, but I have no reason to believe the company did not acquire the domain name.

For many years, the registrant of Kin.com was Microsoft. According to the DomainTools Whois History tool, Kin.com was registered to Microsoft through June of 2017. Until that time, Kin.com was registered publicly at MarkMonitor. Shortly thereafter, the domain name was transferred under Whois privacy to a registrant at Google’s domain registrar. I can only assume the domain name was acquired from Microsoft.

Kin was founded in 2016, although the first articles about the company I could find were from August of 2017. The 2017 articles first mentioning Kin all link to Kin.com. If Kin did have an alternative domain name, I was unable to find it. My guess is the company started out without a domain name or had a stealthy web presence and acquired Kin.com before going to market.

I couldn’t speculate about the value or sale price of Kin.com, but I am sure it was quite high. For what it’s worth, it looks like the company also acquired Kin.CO from Microsoft as well.

Elliot Silver
Elliot Silver
About The Author: Elliot Silver is an Internet entrepreneur and publisher of DomainInvesting.com. Elliot is also the founder and President of Top Notch Domains, LLC, a company that has closed eight figures in deals. Please read the DomainInvesting.com Terms of Use page for additional information about the publisher, website comment policy, disclosures, and conflicts of interest. Reach out to Elliot: Twitter | Facebook | LinkedIn

1 COMMENT

LEAVE A REPLY

Please enter your comment!
Please enter your name here

Recent Posts

2024 Global Domain Report Released Today

0
The annual Global Domain Report, produced jointly by InterNetX and Sedo, has been released and is now available to download at no cost. The...

Grok Knows .com

5
Grok is a generative AI chatbot developed by Elon Musk's company, xAI. Grok has been promoted within the X / Twitter ecosystem, and X...

Dynadot Now Offering Cryptocurrency Payments

1
Dynadot just announced that it now offers customers the ability to make payments using cryptocurrency. The offering is made via Bitpay, which supports more...

Sedo to Host .AI Auction

0
.AI domain names have become a popular topic of late. Some of the most popular domain industry auctions these days are the monthly expiry...

Scaffolding Company Gets Industry Matching .com for Under $50k

0
Sedo’s Senior Broker Dave Evanson reported the sale of Scaffolding.com yesterday. The domain name sold for $46,666, and it was the largest domain name...