Early this morning, Bloomberg reported that View, Inc., a maker of smart glass had received $1.1 billion in funding from the SoftBank Vision Fund. Prior to this announcement, Bloomberg reports, the company had received “about $800 million” in funding from other investors.
The news about this recent round of funding was tweeted out by Techmeme this evening:
View, a startup that makes smart windows with internet-connected frames that can regulate the tinting of the glass, raises $1.1B from SoftBank’s Vision Fund (@valleyhack / Bloomberg)https://t.co/PfufsQYfo2https://t.co/6ax556hbfC
— Techmeme (@Techmeme) November 3, 2018
I visited View.com to see if that is the domain name the company is using, and I saw a 404 error:
A Google search for the company showed me that it is using ViewGlass.com for its website. I was curious to see who owns View.com, and a current Whois search shows that the domain name is now registered to an @viewglass.com email address. Historical Whois Records at DomainTools show that the domain name was registered to a similarly named New York entity (VIEW, Inc.), as recently as September of this year. The former registrant had owned View.com for many years. View.com was created back in 2004.
My guess is the smart glass company acquired the exact match View.com very recently, and I would also guess they could have paid seven figures to buy the domain name.