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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 behind 20 new gTLD apps

Kevin Murphy, April 25, 2012, Domain Registries

OpenRegistry will provide the back-end technical infrastructure for 20 new generic top-level domain applications filed by 15 clients, according to a report.
Dutch telco KPN, consultancy Deloitte and financial management firm LPL Financial are among its dot-brand clients, according to Knack.be, quoting executives.
Presumably, we’re looking at bids for .kpn and .lpl as well as .deloitte, which Deloitte confirmed earlier this month.
Its portfolio of applications also includes two cities – one is .gent for Ghent, the other is an American city – and two generic terms that have not yet been revealed.
(UPDATE: While OpenRegistry is not naming the American city, I hear through the grapevine that it might be Boston).
Its clients have a total market cap of $150 billion, according to the report.
That’s not a bad roster for the start-up, whose technical arm is known as Sensirius. The Benelux company was founded in late 2010 by former executives from EuroDNS and Belgian ccTLD manager DNS.be.
A year ago it won the contract to manage the back-end for .sx, the new ccTLD for Sint Maarten.

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.