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Cognition AI Acquires Its .AI After Raising $21M

Yesterday, I saw a headline that an AI company called Cognition AI had raised $21 million in funding:

Igor Gabrielan Shares Story About Registering .AI Domain Names in 2011

From what I’ve read on Namepros and elsewhere, I believe Igor Gabrielan must hold one of the largest portfolios of good .AI domain names. I think his portfolio of domain names can be found at ai-names.com, which links to an aged thread on the PR.ai forum. I don’t know if that list is current, but it is quite lengthy and contains some strong domain names like Apps.ai, Assistants.ai, Competition.ai, Library.ai….etc.

I don’t think I’ve ever communicated with Igor, and I don’t know much about him. He shared a story about what it was like to register .AI domain names back in 2011, and I thought it was pretty interesting.

ccTLD Domain Names Subject to Home Country Governance

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Country Code Top-Level Domains (ccTLDs) are internet domain name extensions that are designated for a country or sovereign state. Each is identified by two-letter codes such as .IT for Italy, .CA for Canada, and .IN for India. The primary purpose of a ccTLD is to show its association with a particular geographical locations.

In addition to its local usage, ccTLD domain names have long been used as .com alternatives or for domain name hacks. For instance, years ago, the .LY extension was popular because of services like Bitly. More recently .AI and .IO have become popular domain name extensions that are sought after by companies and domain investors alike from around the world.

Ammar Kubba Shares Background About .io Sale

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Pickleball player Ammar Kubba – founder of and investor in numerous domain industry companies – recently announced two .io domain name sales. The first sale was closed while he was playing pickleball. The second was closed while he was thinking about playing pickleball.

Notably, after sharing his second .io domain name sale, Ammar shared some background about other domain names with the same keyword. I found this noteworthy because the attributes of the other extensions were not what I would normally guess for a ~$10k .io domain name sale.

Will You Bid on the Monthly .AI Expiry Auctions?

Earlier this week, I bought my first .AI domain names. I have been looking at aftermarket options, but my level of risk tolerance for these domain names is below what it would take to purchase anything worthwhile right now. As a result, my first .AI domain names were hand registrations.

The alternatives to hand registering domain names are aftermarket acquisitions or expiry auctions operated by the .AI registry.

My First .AI Domain Names

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When it comes to domain industry trends, I am not a first mover. I probably own some trend-ish domain names, but my bread and butter remains good one or two word .coms.

For the past year or so, I have been keeping an eye on startups using .AI domain names and publicly reported .AI domain name sales. After seeing some friends and colleagues appear to have success with their own .AI domain names, I decided to buy my first .AI domain names. I succumbed to FOMO.

For a variety of reasons, I am not going to share the names I bought, but I will share some insight behind my purchase.

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