TransferWise, the money transfer service founded in 2011, has announced that it is rebranding to Wise. Wisely, the company has acquired the Wise.com domain, too.
Founded in London by Kristo Kaarmann and Taavet Hinrikus, Wise quickly built a reputation as one of the easiest means of transferring money, especially from country to country.
The company attracted significant investment, with Crunchbase reporting that Wise raised $1.1 billion up until January 2021, with investors including Andreessen Horowitz, Richard Branson, and JP Morgan.
Today, Wise’s Kristo Kaarmann published a blog post officially announcing TransferWise’s rebrand to Wise.
Wise is looking at providing services far beyond transferring money, meaning the company has outgrown the TransferWise moniker.
Along with rebranding to Wise, the company acquired Wise.com in a deal brokered by Media Options. The transfer of Wise.com was first spotted by Jamie Zoch, noticing that the name had moved from the possession of Broadcom Inc to a privacy-protected GoDaddy account in November 2020.
It is likely that Broadcom/Symantec (they merged) sold Wise․com with the domain transferring to GoDaddy under privacy in June 2020. I will go on a limb and say Transferwise may be the buyer? They filed a “Wise” TM in April 2020 & both domains are using Cloudflare NS currently.
— Jamie Zoch (@DotWeekly) November 18, 2020
Broadcom acquired the Wise.com domain name after acquiring Symantec’s enterprise security software division for $10.7 billion. Wise.com was previously used by Symantec’s Wise Package Studio.
The Wise.com domain name was acquired several months after Wise, the TransferWise, filed a trademark for the use of Wise.
Media Options’ role in Wise’s acquisition of Wise.com was confirmed by CEO Andrew Rosener in a tweet, although a purchase price was not disclosed.
We got https://t.co/16n1TydUp9 for them! Another killer deal for the @MediaOptions team!
Another killer domain is #OffTheMarketForever https://t.co/6Wwj44ir08
— Andrew Rosener (@andrewrosener) February 22, 2021
The rebrand to Wise comes as rumors surface about a forthcoming IPO. Sky News in the UK reported that Wise “has appointed Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley as joint global co-ordinators for its long-awaited initial public offering (IPO).”
The article suggests that the company will be valued in excess of $5 billion.
As of writing, Wise is using both TransferWise.com and Wise.com to host separate, but almost identical, websites. The long-term plan is to start to redirect TransferWise.com to Wise.com.
Interestingly, there’s another digital banking company called Wise, operating on Wise.us. The company announced a $12 million Series A funding round in October 2020.