Towards the end of August of this year, Uniregistry reported the $92,000 sale of Skew.com. The sale was the largest publicly reported sale of the week in DNJournal. It is also the 44th largest sale of the year (to date). Skew.com was acquired by a cryptocurrency data analytics firm called Skew.
This morning, it was reported that Skew raised $2 million in a seed funding round with several investors, including Silicon Valley venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins.
JUST IN: Crypto data analytics startup @skew_markets has raised $2 million in seed funding from several VC firms including Silicon Valley icon @kleinerperkins.
Via @Nate_DiCamillo https://t.co/9nFBVO7ftK
— CoinDesk (@coindesk) September 25, 2019
From what I can tell, the company seems to have used sk3w.co for its domain name prior to the acquisition of Skew.com. Yes – that is a .CO domain name with the number “3” in place of the “e.” Yuck.
Prior to the sale of Skew.com, the domain name was privately registered at Uniregistry. As a result, I am unsure who sold the domain name. I do not believe it was Frank Schilling’s Name Administration company though, because I do not believe the company uses Whois privacy for the majority of its domain names. My guess is that it was a private seller who sold the name via Uniregistry.
Skew.com is a pretty solid domain name, and acquiring the domain name in advance of its seed funding round was a smart decision. I am not sure if the domain name was acquired before the funding was raised, or if it was done after the money was secured. I would say securing this 4 letter, one word .com domain name for less than six figures was a nice score for the startup.
I was curious to see if any TMs existed for the word ‘skew’.
I was shocked that the word ‘skew’ has no live TMs registered in USPTO.
And, only 9 live TMs that contain the word ‘skew’ with other letters or words (ie, skewdex).
For the buyer, it was a great purchase price.
The domain was reg’d 11-1999. I wonder if it was reg’d and dropped between 1994 and 1999. ?