According to Crunchbase, financial services company Fruitful came out of stealth mode with $37 million of funding under its belt. The company, though, has been building behind the scenes since last year, predominantly under the brand name Branch.
I wrote in December 2021 that Branch, which was operating on Branch.com at the time, rebranded to Fruitful, naturally moving away from the Branch.com domain name.
Since then, Branch.com began forwarding to OurBranch.com, the home of insurance startup Branch. This Branch has raised $229.5 million in funding since launching in 2017, including a $147 million Series C round that was disclosed in June 2022.
Fruitful’s move away from Branch.com seemed perplexing at the time, but by piecing newly gathered information together, it’s possible that the young startup received an offer for the domain that it couldn’t refuse.
A recent press release from Fruitful announced that the company had come out of stealth mode with $43 million worth of funding. That’s $6 million more than Crunchbase lists. Where does this additional funding come from? Potentially, from a domain sale.
According to the press release, “An additional $10 million in funds were generated through a convertible note and domain sale.” Referring back to Crunchbase, we can see that a $4 million convertible note is listed on Fruitful’s profile, leaving a $6 million gap for the domain sale to fill. Of course, there could have been other undisclosed convertible notes, which would reduce the price of the domain, but I haven’t found any evidence for that.
While this is not concrete enough to be officially listed as a sale, Fruitful’s press release does point to the possibility of a $6 million domain sale, likely to be Branch.com.
Fruitful itself switched to Fruitful.co, but it has recently secured a domain upgrade, which you can read about on DomainNameWire.
Corporate domain sellers understand the true value of dot-Com.
Domainers should take heed to their pricing models.