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Whois vacuum AppDetex raises $10 million

Kevin Murphy, March 20, 2019, Domain Registrars

Brand protection registrar AppDetex, which counts Facebook as its key customer, has raised $10 million in funding.
It’s the second round of venture capital for the six-year-old Boise, Idaho company. This one was led by First Analysis, with first-round investors EPIC Ventures and Origin Ventures each also taking an extra piece.
AppDetex says it has raised $17.5 million to date.
The company will be best known to registrars and other DI readers for its attempts last year to vacuum up vast amounts of Whois data, post-GDPR, on behalf of mainly Facebook.
The AppDetex WHOIS Requestor System (AWRS) is a semi-automated service that streamlines the process of requesting unredacted Whois records from registrars. I was given a demo last October.
The company came in for criticism for allegedly misrepresenting the results of its initial testing of the system, using the data to lobby ICANN and to market its product.
But AppDetex is apparently not just about the domains. It also offers brand monitoring services for social media platforms, app stores and web sites.
As a registrar, the company had a little over 1,500 gTLD domains under management at the last count, so the new investment is clearly not based upon its prowess as a volume registrar but rather on its value-added managed services.
AppDetex was founded by Faisal Shah (a founder of MarkMonitor) and Chris Bura (previously of AllDomains.com) in 2012.
The company has been closely affiliated with Facebook for some time.
Back in 2016, Facebook acquired RegistrarSEC, a registrar accreditation run by Shah and Bura that at the time was actually doing business under the name “AppDetex”, in order to protect Instagram.com from a Chinese court.
AppDetex has also hired staff from Facebook, and its general counsel is married to Facebook’s head of domain strategy.
According to data Tucows released a month ago, almost two thirds of the Whois requests it received since GDPR came into effect came from Facebook and AppDetex.