Payfone Acquires Prove.com and Rebrands

Over a year ago, I tried to buy Prove.com, but the six figure price tag of the domain name was beyond what I could spend for it as an investment. Using the DomainTools Whois History tool, I can see that Prove.com sold sometime between April and July of this year. I just learned that a New York company called Payfone recently acquired Prove.com, and the company announced a rebrand to Prove earlier this week:

We are thrilled to announce that @payfone is now @ProveIdentity! Representing a new era of modern identity authentication & a reaffirmation of our mission: to help companies reach their goals by enabling them to authenticate customers accurately, effortlessly, and privately. pic.twitter.com/i2sXpMNy87

— Prove Identity (@ProveIdentity) July 29, 2020

In addition to the major rebranding, the company also announced that it raised a $100 million round of funding as well:

“Payfone, the modern platform for continuous identity authentication, announced today that it has rebranded as Prove. The rebrand represents the rebirth of the company as the worldwide leader in identity authentication and verification with a plan for rapid growth, including its recent acquisition of Early Warning Services, LLC’s mobile authentication lines of business and $100 million fundraise. “

Not only do I think the Prove brand is better than Payfone, I also think the company will benefit from not having to worry about confusion with the proper spelling of pay phone. I am sure company employees had to deal with misdirected emails. Prove.com is easy to spell and recall, and I think it is an authoritative domain name and brand.

I had a brief chat with Tom FitzSimmons, CFO of Prove, and I am hopeful he will be able to share the acquisition price to buy Prove.com. I know what the owner had been asking, but I am not comfortable sharing that figure since it was a private negotiation. If Tom is able to share the acquisition price I will provide an update. It would rank as one of the top domain name sales of the year.

Update:

Brian Harbin from Grit Brokerage reached out to me this afternoon to let me know his company brokered the sale of Prove.com for $175,000. He sent me an Escrow.com screenshot with the details. Once Ron Jackson independently confirms the sale price, it will rank as the #12 publicly reported domain name sale of the year in DNJournal. I will also add it to the Embrace.com list of recent one word .com sales.