Two startups building their brands on .IO domains raised $53M combined today

I’ve been talking quite a bit about how extensions like .CO, .IO, .AI and others are seeing strong growth in the startup world and investors don’t seem to be phased by these non .COM innovators.

Today was a pretty special day for companies branding on .IO as Clearx.io announced a $13M raise and Aiven.io announced a $40M raise. So what are these companies doing to get investors so excited? I’ll start with Clear.

First I have to say, I’m pretty surprised that Clear is branding on Clearx.io rather than Clear.io…this is pretty rare IMO that a company brands on a .IO domain but can’t get their first choice name. I wouldn’t be surprised if they upgrade to Clear.io in the near-future, but let’s get to the good stuff – what do they do?

As usual, a picture is worth a thousand words and a video is worth a lot more than that, here’s a quick ~1 min video running through what Clear does at a high-level:

As for the one liner, I’ll give it a shot. Clear is a Blockchain technology company that has created a system to allow smart contracts to be created and executed automatically. Don’t understand that…well watch the darn video then!

Now onto Aiven.io which raised a monster $40M round that just got announced today. In this case, they are branding on their exact-match .IO which makes a whole lot more sense to me.

Given that Aiven.com is an existing company in China there is probably little-to-no chance Aiven will move to the .COM so if they do decided to move away from the .IO someday that will likely mean changing their name.

Looking at their Crunchbase profile the company has raised $50M so far and they are growing fast. So what do they do? Once again, I think a video does it a lot more justice if you really want to understand the nitty gritty:

As for the one-liner, I’ll give it a shot. Aiven allows you to quickly and easily build data pipelines so you can focus on software rather than infastructure.

Huge congrats to both Aiven and Clear, big day for both of them! 🙌

Morgan Linton

Morgan Linton