Mode Acquired Mode.com Before Series C Funding

This morning, TechCrunch reported that “Mode, a five-year-old collaborative analytics platform based in San Francisco, has raised $23 million in Series C funding led by Valor Equity Partners.” In total, the company has raised $50 million in funding. Smartly, Mode acquired the brand match Mode.com domain name prior to the announcement of the most recent round of funding.

Several years ago, Mode.com was owned by Mode Media, a company that went bankrupt after hitting a valuation of $1 billion. I followed the case relatively closely because of the exceptional domain names that were involved, including Mode.com, Bliss.com, Tinker.com, Glam.com, and others. In fact, I placed a bid on the domain name assets that were ultimately sold to another company.

Shortly after the group of domain names was sold, Joe Uddeme of NameExperts.com was engaged to re-sell the domain names. I reached out to Joe to ask about Mode.com, and he confirmed that he successfully brokered the sale of the domain name in October of 2018. Although he could not be more specific about the Mode.com sale price, he told me it had a $750,000 asking price and it had a “Low/mid six figure purchase price.”

Prior to the acquisition of the Mode.com domain name, I believe the company had been using ModeAnalytics.com for its website. ModeAnalytics.com now forwards to Mode.com.

Assuming a ballpark price of $350,000, from my perspective, Mode got a very fair price to buy the domain name and the seller probably got a nice ROI as well.