Boyu Capital and IDG Capital led the funding round, and existing shareholders Tencent, HSG (formerly known as Sequoia China), ZhenFund and others also participated.

Sorry, USC in California. Another school will operate .usc. The University of South Carolina has applied for a top level domain name: .usc. I believe this is just the second university in the United States to apply for a top level domain. Massachusetts Institute of Technology applied for .mit in the 2012 round. It seems [...]

See the top domain registrars for .com domains. ICANN has published the latest registrar-by-registrar data for the .com namespace using official data from Verisign. The data is always three months in arrears; the newest data provided is for June 2026. I added a new column this month that shows where the registrar ranked the prior [...]

Music.taylorswift is coming to a browser near you. Pop star Taylor Swift is getting a new home on the web. The singer has applied for her own top level domain name, .taylorswift, as part of ICANN’s 2026 expansion round of top level domains. Interestingly, had the artist applied for .swift, she would have run into [...]

Vesta, an AI-native software startup that helps lenders originate mortgages, announced a $30 million round led by Conversion Capital. 

Company replaces 19 of its proposed strings. Well, that was quick. Less than 24 hours after ICANN revealed which top level domains companies applied for, Link Freedom Group has decided which strings it will continue to pursue. The second-largest applicant is still applying for 158 domains, but it has swapped in some replacement strings. I [...]

The travel booking site wants to create the .yeah TLD after using it in commercials for years. It’s been a joke among domain industry insiders that the company promotes the non-existent domain name. Well, the joke might end soon: the company applied for .yeah in this year’s new top level domain expansion round. Did the [...]

casinos.deal Estimated end time: 2026-10-09 10:09 ESTCurrent Bid: 30 EUR Reserve not met Bids: 1 Domain Language: --

ICANN's 2026 new gTLD round attracted 333 dotBrand applications, representing 20.6% of submissions. Participation across major industries reflects growing interest in controlling branded namespaces and strengthening enterprise digital identity.

Mecka AI collects and analyzes human motion data to train humanoid robots and other kinds of robots. The startup pays people to record everyday tasks.