Root Insurance is an auto insurance startup based in Columbus, Ohio, and it recently raised approximately $350 million dollars on a $3.5 billion valuation.
The company is competing against such well-established giants as Progressive and Geico, and it has previously received $100 million in a separate round of funding.
It operates from the domain JoinRoot.com, a verb, prompt-based domain name, and RootInsurance.com forwards to it as well.
Despite the monetary windfall of millions of dollars, Root Insurance won’t be able to acquire the domain name Root.com any time soon, in our opinion.
Root Insurance operates from JoinRoot.com
That ultra premium, one word domain name was registered in 1994, and it’s operated by Root Advisors, a book-keeping, payroll and tax services company based in Bloomington, Indiana. They seem to have acquired the domain Root.com sometime in late 2004, according to DomainTools, from its previous owner, TeraSolutions.
An established firm such as Root Advisors maintains its prestige for more than 15 years through the use of the domain name Root.com. It’s highly unlikely they would sell it for anything less than an astronomical amount of money, in the tens of millions of dollars, in our opinion.
Fun fact: Root Insurance owns the domain RootAdvisors.com since 2018. 🙂 Was that a coincidence, or a spiteful act following a potential rejection of their attempts to buy the domain Root.com?
Anything is possible!
Root.com Hmmm money talks IMO they will buy it, scale is everything
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Fun fact: Root Insurance owns the domain RootAdvisors.com since 2018. 🙂 Was that a coincidence, or a spiteful act following a potential rejection of their attempts to buy the domain Root.com?”
Not necessarily, they may have purchased the domain to keep it from being snatched up by someone else so when they made the offer for root.com they would have a viable substitute domain to offer. I may have had nothing to do with spite and more to do with planning.
MapleDots – Root Insurance already had $100 MM in 2018. If they were to make an offer for root.com it was probably made already.
Hence my point exactly…
They stand greater odds of getting the roots domain if they secured an alternate to offer in on the deal. Imagine if they had not spent the ten bucks and one of us bought RootAdvisors.com, that would have complicated things even further.
It was a wise preemptive move on the part of Roots Insurance to purchase that domain.
MapleDots – The exchange is more of a soft “blackmail” than anything else. The wise preemptive would be to offer LOTS of cash. Hopefully now they will wise up.
Agreed completely, cash is always the answer but just imagine if a domainer owned RootAdvisors.com, that would have thrown a third party into the equation. In my opinion Root Insurance is not soft blackmailing anyone, they have cash plus an alternate name to offer. It puts them in a better bargaining position to have both.
Imagine instead….. here is our cash, too bad a squatter owns your name.
What do you mean you want what we offered and what the squatter wants!!!
Get my point?
It was a wise $10 investment