CitizenHawk, a digital brand management company, has raised $3 million in funding from Maveron LLC.
CitizenHawk helps companies protect their online brands by targeting cybersquatters. According to CitizenHawk, up to 20% of hand-typed URLs are misspelled, which has created a market for “typo” domains. Many of these “typosquatting” sites employ the use of profane ads and spyware to maximize their profits, which can tarnish a brand’s image. CitizenHawk locates these sites, notifies them of their trademark infringements, and initiates legal action if the offenders refuse to cooperate.
CitizenHawk intends to use the money to increase their staff and encourage growth in the market. The company was founded in 2006 and is based in Aliso Viejo, California.
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Boy, this sure is a niche market. I’m amazed they got $3 million in venture capital.
Agreed, that is a lot of money. Are these guys a tech company or a legal company? It seems like the technology is easily copied, so must be their ability/track record on the legal site that makes this interesting. But…still a lot money.
Sure its niche but its part of a lot larger industry: domain parking- i believe they’ll be targeting the large domain portfolio owners and parking services, whom park and profit from these trademarked infringing names by placing Google/yahoo links on their parked pages- domain parking on a whole is estimated at north of a $1 billion/yr industry and with the recent capitalization of Oversee.net($180 MM noted here) and IPO flirtations of Name.com signalizing legitimization, how much of their traffic is coming from these TM domains?
These guys just sound like a barrel of laughs. It’s a smart idea though.
Sounds to me like they are more service oriented then product oriented. In that case they should be able to scale their staff based on incoming work and cash flow instead of investment capital. Sound a lot like the web design boutiques (Agency.com or Pixelpark anyone ?) that got huge funding to scale their workforce to prepare for even better business to come, just to implode as soon as the bubble inflated.
Peter
Do you follow me on http://twitter.com/peterurban
This is ass backwards and won’t help brands in any way, shape or form. There are other, real ways of protecting a brand online. How are they going to pursue people in places like Vietnam, Poland, Russia, etc? ICANN is the only way and companies proceed that way, on their own, already.
Jimi,
re: Oversee.net($180 MM noted here)
A: It was $150m - fyi
re: and IPO flirtations of Name.com
A: NameMedia.com has filed not Name.com
Did u guys remember how Google solved this problem…. they registered 1000s of similar domains…. lol… very clever !
Cybersquatters are scumbags…Booyah!!
Sounds a little like what http://www.brandverity.com is working on
Noble cause, but the problem is in policy.
Your profile is inaccurate, they already raised money from Maveron in the past…
http://domainnamewire.com/2007.....squatting/
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