Undeveloped, a startup that lets you easily buy and sell domain names, has been acquired by US registrar Epik (who calls itself ‘The Swiss Bank of Domains’) for an undisclosed sum.
The Amsterdam-based startup, founded in 2014, “will operate as a wholly owned subsidiary of the Epik Holdings Inc group of companies executing on its existing roadmap with the current management team”, said founder Reza Sardeha in an e-mail to users.
In said e-mail, Undeveloped also wants to assure that their full team will remain intact.
Liquidity
Both parties said they want to introduce more liquidity in the domain industry for sellers. And here’s the interesting part: in the near future, Epik and Undeveloped want to introduce “new ways of monetizing your domains which will allow you to create recurring build-up revenue streams instead of having to depend solely on situational transactions every single month.”
Sardeha has written a Medium-post in which he describes what the acquisition means both technically and business-wise.
From seed funding to exit in two years
Undeveloped was in the 2015 Rockstart accelerator Web & Mobile class. It only raised a 400.000 euro seed round from the Dutch private equity firm Axivate Capital around the same time they became alumni. So within two years of getting an investment, the startup managed to get acquired.
Six months ago, Undeveloped got the first offer from Epik. But the startup wasn’t keen on selling at first. Sardeha didn’t thought it was the right time, he says in an interview on the Rockstart blog.
But then “we realised that we could actually accelerate our growth dramatically by gaining access to Epik’s core technology and resources that we could use instantly, instead of taking two years to build it ourselves.”
Image by Saaleha Bamjee on Flickr