Mediaboss Marketing

By Lora Kolodny

Donutshas raised more than $100 million in a mammoth Series A round, not to make crispy, dunk-able diet killers, but to become a registry for generic top-level domains or gTLDs, a new type of unique, online identifier.

The round was led by Austin Ventures and joined by Adams Street Partners, Emergence Capital, TL Ventures, Generation Partners, Stahurricane (founder and Chief Executive Paul Stahuras own venture fund) and a number of angels and other funds.

Web industry associations and regulators limit the number of top level domain names to 22 types today, including .com, .edu and .net. Stahura says businesses and bloggers alike should be able to secure memorable addresses more affordably when the gTLDs become available.

Right now its difficult to find a good name, a memorable name in .com, he said. We will provide specificity and choice. If youre a doctor, lets say, you could get .doctor. If you have a small cleaning business you might get .cleaning.

Donuts Vice President of CommunicationsMason Cole pointed out that in one recent domain name sale, PersonalLoans.com sold for $1 million. Thats a lot to spend on a used name, he said, What if the buyer had access to personal.loans instead?

Donuts applied to secure and operate 307 different new domains, none of which are phrases that are geographic (like .nyc) or trademarked (like .microsoft), Stahura reports.

It is not clear who the company will be in contention with to obtain swathes of gTLDs from the non-profit entity that doles them out,ICANN(Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers). An announcement about who applied for which names is due on June 13. Some companies and organizations, from AARP to Googleand Zippo, have already disclosed which names they want to obtain (a list is available athttp://thetoplevel.com).

ICANNs mission is to keep the Internet operable and secure through coordination of its naming system. Last week, it closed the window for applications to acquire gTLDs.

Despite Donuts broadly appealing brand name, the start-up will not sell to mainstream web users, rather to registrars, or the retailers of domain names. These retailers include Superbowl advertisers likeGoDaddy,Register.comorTucows.com(better known as Hover). They also include eNom, the company Stahura founded earlier in his career and sold in 2006 to Demand Media.

Link:
Donuts Raises $100M-Plus To Deliver ‘Dot-Anything-You-Want’ Domain Names