American Capital shows Geosign the Money (and makes a smart investment in the process)

Domain / SEM /Media juggernaut Geosign has just closed a whopping 160 million equity investment from American Capital Strategies Ltd. (Nasdaq: ACAS). 

This just illustrates that sleeper deals in the domain space are still getting done away from the shine of the spotlight as the smart money continues to make its way toward undervalued domain names and name related companies. This is a huge deal for American Capital which is getting a paid search power house (IMO).  It’s an even bigger deal for Geosign founder Tim Nye and his company who have done a spectacular job growing from virtually nothing over the last 7 years. I am constantly amazed by the rags to riches stories that run through the domain industry..  I alalogize it to the oil business in Texas during the wildcat years. Geosign (and American Capital now) own outlandishly good names like hockey.com, golfcourses.com, plasticsurgeons.com and tens of thousands of other names across 150 verticals; supported by over 100 writers, editors and support staff who create related content for their properties. They have a total staff of over 200 now largely based in Guelph, Ontario Canada (which is good for their investors because its cold and boring in Guelph.. very conducive to working).  Additionally, Geosign runs a useful local search engine called truelocal.com and own a minority stake in Irvine California’s GO2.  What’s neat about GO2 is they own the Goto.com brand (Overture.com’s historical search brand) which they bought as part of a trademark resolution from Overture before Overture sold to Yahoo. It would be really cool to see Geosign resurrect one of the Internet’s cool historical search brands like “Goto”,  lever it with their truelocal.com search technology and the brute-force of their extensive type-in domain name portfolio.  Wow.. I thought I was going to have to write about something boring this morning  J

Comments

[PaulF]

Hey Frank, Guelph is the #2 place to live in Canada - don't knock it! :-)

http://www.canadianbusiness.com/rankings/bestplacestolive/list.jsp?pageID=profile&profile=33&year=2006&type=profile&listType=CITY

***FS*** My tongue planted firmly in cheek Paul.. I'm going to retire there :) Simply a gentle ribbing to the city and its ice festival.. no disrespect to it's upstanding people.