Did Elevate.com Sell for $230,000?

Elevate Credit, Inc. went public last month, and it now trades on the New York Stock Exchange under the ELVT ticker symbol. The company operates on the exceptional Elevate.com domain name.

I came across the company’s Form S-1 filing, which was made in advance of its initial public offering. One line item caught my attention. On page F-7, the company reported a “Domain name acquisition” in the amount of $230,000 in 2014. Could this be the acquisition of Elevate.com? I do not know for certain because the specific domain name is not mentioned in the line item, but it seems like this is  plausible.

In looking through the registrant history of the domain name using the DomainTools Whois History tool, it looks like the Elevate.com domain name was registered to  a company in Tempe, Arizona in February of 2014. A month later, in March of 2014, the domain name was registered to Elevate Credit Service, LLC. The domain name then went under Whois privacy protection.

I looked through my email history, and I see that a domain broker mentioned  it in a newsletter in 2013 without an asking price. Interestingly (perhaps), I see that I referenced the domain name in a 2015 email to a different  broker at the same domain  brokerage, and he mentioned that it had been sold the prior year. I am unsure if that brokerage was involved with the sale, but I would assume a NDA was  in place because there is no public record of a sale of Elevate.com in NameBio.

If Elevate.com was the domain name referenced in the S-1 filing, it seems like a really reasonable  price for a domain name of this caliber. Looking at the DNJournal publicly reported domain name sale chart from 2014, a $230,000 sale would have tied with the sale of Cute.com at #32 on the list.

To try and get confirmation about the domain name acquisition yesterday, I reached out to a representative of Elevate  via phone and sent an email to the investor relations contact. I also sent an email to the former registrant to ask if  Elevate.com sold for $230,000. Unfortunately, I did not hear back, and I presume I  will not receive a public confirmation.

It does appear that Elevate.com changed hands  in 2014, but it is not certain that this is the domain name mentioned in the filing. The company used the singular “domain name acquisition,” but it is possible that more than one domain name acquisition is included in the line item. I will share an update if I hear back from the current registrant or the former registrant.