With over $100M in funding combined, these three startups are innovating like crazy, and building their brands on .CO

Since I live and work in San Francisco, it’s safe to say I see a lot of billboards and ads on the street aimed at startups. Lately I’ve been seeing a lot of .CO domains so I thought it would be fun to highlight a few of them that caught my eye.

It’s no secret that startups branding on .CO have raised tens of millions of dollars or more. The top angel investment platform in the world, Angel List, has been on Angel.co since inception and along with seeing .CO around town I feel like I read about another startup branding on .CO getting funding almost weekly.

To kick things off, let’s start with a startup I literally just found out about this week on my walk to the gym – Mercury.co.

With $26M in funding and backing from an incredibly impressive list of investors including Andreessen Horowitz, Mercury is trying to re-investing banking for startups. The banking world is a space that is ripe for disruption and as someone that has banked with traditional banks for a long time I can tell you that I’m certainly ready to see a startup take on this challenge.

From my experience big banks are old and clunky, their online systems are difficult to navigate, and connecting to bank APIs is a nightmare. Mercury has two taglines, “Banking for startups” and “engineered by engineers” – the second is pretty powerful because I think this is where most big old traditional banks have fallen short…they’re designed by bankers, not engineers, which is whey their backend UX is so darn clunky.

Given the amount of funding Mercury has already raised, and the stellar list of investors they have behind them, my guess is we’re going to be hearing even more about them over the years. And like I said above, they’re jamming away building their brand on Mercury.co.

Next up is Mirror.co, a startup that is disrupting the home fitness market with smart mirrors. The idea is – imagine being able to put a mirror in your home that has a workout instructor built into it? If this sounds like something out of Blade Runner, think again, it’s here and given that the company makes a smart mirror, Mirror.co is a solid choice of domain names.

To-date Mirror.co has raised over $40M in funding from some great VCs like First Round Capital and Spark Capital. Based in New York Mirror.co is pioneering what I think is going to be a huge industry.

If you think about it, for far too long working out at home has been a pretty boring experience. Usually you buy some weights, maybe find a workout class or two online, then try to encourage yourself to transform your living room into a gym on a regular basis.

By having both a dedicated piece of hardware with a trainer built-in, and the ability to track progress and continually get new content, I think Mirror.co is on a similar path to that that Peloton just took, and is clearly paying off.

Last but certainly not least is a startup that’s actually only a few blocks away from our offices in SF, Brit + Co which has branded on Brit.co since inception. After working at both Apple and Google, Brit + Co’s founder and CEO Brit Morin decided she wanted to start a company of her own and Brit.co is the realization of that vision.

Now, Brit.co has become a leading online media company with over $40M in funding and an active community of over $10M members. It’s not uncommon to find the CEO, Brit on CNN or the Daily Show and given that Brit.com is already the domain for another company, my guess is they’ll be happy on Brit.co forever.

Congrats to all three of these amazing startups, Mercury.co, Mirror.co, and Brit.co – together they’ve raised over $100M and something tells me there’s a lot more coming given how fast they’re all growing!

Morgan Linton

Morgan Linton