As reported by Domainincite.com, Endurance International Group Holdings Inc, filed for an IPO to $400 million in an initial public offering of its common stock and plans on buying Directi for between $100 and $110 million Dollars. In buying Directi Endurance would also get Radix Registry which has 29 active new gTLD applications of which 26 are in contention.
Endurance is also committing an additional $62 Million dollars or over 2 million per contested string for auctions.
As for existing business which includes registrars Domain.com and Dotster as well as a bunch of hosting companies including HostGator, The company said its revenue more than tripled to $292.2 million, while its net losses widened to $139.3 million from $44.3 million during the last three years.
The company intends to list on the Nasdaq under the symbol “EIGI” and named Goldman Sachs, Credit Suisse and Morgan Stanley as lead underwriters to the offering.
Of course this is another huge deal for the domain name industry and shows how much money is coming into the business largely driven by the new gTLD program.
Directi also owns Logic Boxes which is a back end solution for registrars, a bunch of registrars including BigRock.com and will give Endurance a larger market share of the domain name registrar market.
Directi also owns Skenzo a domain name monetization company which appears would go along with the sale.
I have confirmed that Media.Net is not included in the sale.
For years, it’s been claimed that DirectI was worth $300 million+ (do a search for “DirectI million” or “DirectI funding” without the quotes). It’s interesting to see the real valuation today.
Also, we now know via the SEC filing that HostGator was acquired for $299.8 million last year (see page F-22 of the S-1 filing).
George
I reached out to Bhavin on this issue this morning and got this response:
“We cant comment on valuations , we are a pvt company”
That’s a funny response, Mike, given that they commented on their purported valuation repeatedly over the past 5 years, while they were a “private company.”
Indeed, their own website continues to say:
http://www.directi.com/about/corporate-profile
“Valued at 350+ million dollars”
as does their Twitter account, https://twitter.com/directi
“is a $350+ million group of businesses, that develop innovative mass-market Web Products for millions of Customers worldwide.”
I pointed that out to Bhavin of course we don’t know what media.net is internally valued at.
i’m surprised they are doing so well after the clusterf*ck they caused moving to domain.com/dotster/mydomain to a new platform that caused 1000’s to lose domains. i personally couldn’t wait to get out of that overpriced turd after that happened.
at this point, the past valuations only matter to past investors to the extent they were based on past investments.
all-in-all, an impressive exit.
congrats to Bhavin and Divyank.
Registrant lose/lose situation.
When will people understand that valuation is rarely the sale price, that’s two things different…
Congrats for the very nice sale!
The money is coming especially to investments that seem that can bring lots of money without anyone stopping to analyse things as they are. We have all seen this before.