In a blog post written by Union Square Ventures (USV) Managing Partner Brad Burnham on the USV blog, the New York City-based venture capital firm announced that it “made a substantial investment in Tucows.” The VC firm did not mention how much it invested in the company, but the amount may eventually be revealed since Tucows is a NASDAQ-listed publicly traded company (TCX). You should have a look at the blog post to see all of the reasons USV made this investment.
I reached out to Tucows President and CEO Elliot Noss to ask for his reaction to seeing the confidence USV has in what his company has achieved and the company’s plans going forward. Elliot was kind enough to reply and had this to say:
I have been bugging Brad to join the board for years. Of course I love all of the folks at USV, but this is really about Brad. As they noted, this is not their typical investment (at all). In fact it is the mirror image in many ways. That being said we have lots to learn from each other and we are both excited to start working on things together. And it is nice to have a sexy VC in the domains space! 🙂
Investing in Tucows is a pretty solid endorsement of the company by a leading VC firm. Union Square Ventures has quite a few winners in its portfolio of funded companies dating back over ten years. Among the companies USV has listed under exits are Tumblr (Seed), Twitter (Series A), Zynga (Series A), Delicious (Seed), and Etsy (Seed). Some of its current investments include Stripe, Stack Overflow, CloudFlare, Coinbase, and Duck Duck Go.
Fred Wilson, Managing Partner at Union Square Ventures, has written about domain names before on his AVC.com blog. In 2011, I wrote about his comments regarding the purchase price of domain names and how companies should spend up to $50,000 to buy a great domain name. It would be interesting to see how he feels now. Based on his company’s investment in Tucows, it would seem that USV is confident in the health of the domain name industry.
With Tucows’ recent acquisition of eNom, the company is now the second largest domain registrar in the world. Based on the comments shared in the USV blog post, the company has a lot going on in addition to its domain name business.
