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New gTLD registry is latest billion-dollar unicorn

Kevin Murphy, June 13, 2019, Domain Registrars

A new gTLD registry that used a different new gTLD for its original web site has merged to form a new company valued at a billion dollars using a new brand in a third new gTLD.
Combell Group announced this week that it has merged with TransIP Group, and that its combined valuation is over $1 billion.
They’re both European hosting companies. Together, they say that have 1.2 million customers and 600 employees.
The newly merged entity is called team.blue — that’s its brand and, using an Afilias-operated gTLD, its new primary domain.
As a privately held company with a billion-dollar valuation, it joins a list of companies called “unicorns”. For some reason.
Combell and TransIP both have domain registrar businesses and play primarily into the Scandinavian and Benelux regions of Europe.
Combell, which has its corporate site at combell.group, owns Danish registrar DanDomain, which was ICANN-accredited with about 20,000 domains under management until it allowed its accreditation to lapse at the start of the year.
TransIP, which was using a .eu domain, is ICANN-accredited, but has no gTLD domains to its name.
Curiously, the two registrars have sequential IANA IDs — 1603 and 1604.
Combell is also the registry for .gent, the new gTLD for the Belgian city of Ghent.

OpenRegistry wins .gent registry deal

Kevin Murphy, June 24, 2011, Domain Registries

Add another city top-level domain to your lists, the Belgian city of Ghent is set to apply for .gent, using OpenRegistry as its back-end registry software provider
The application for .gent will be made to ICANN by ComBell, a smallish local registrar, which already has the required local government support.
Ghent is Belgium’s third-largest city, with 250,000 residents, so we’re probably looking at a relatively low-volume TLD.
The “Gent” spelling is Dutch.
It sounds like ComBell will be running the infrastructure, assuming the bid is approved, using OpenRegistry’s software, which has also been selected to run a couple of small new ccTLDs.