OpenAI has bought the Chat.com domain. OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman confirmed the purchase on Wednesday in a post on X. Chat.com now redirects users to the startup’s AI-powered chatbot, ChatGPT.
The domain, chat.com, was previously owned by the founder and CTO of HubSpot, Dharmesh Shah who acquired it for USD$15.5 million (approx. UGX56.87 billion) last year making it one of the top 2 all-time publically reported domain sales coming after voice.com that was sold for USD$30 million (approx. UGX110.069 billion) in 2019 to Block.one, the startup behind the EOS cryptocurrency.
Announcing the purchase of Chat.com in a LinkedIn post before he resold it, Shah wrote “The reason I bought Chat.com is simple: I think chat-based UX (#ChatUX) is the next big thing in software. Communicating with computers/software through a natural language interface is much more intuitive. This is made possible by Generative AI,”
In a March LinkedIn post, Shah shared that he had sold Chat.com for more than he had paid for it. While he didn’t say to whom he had sold the domain at the time, yesterday Shan revealed in a post on X that OpenAI was that buyer — additionally implying that the company paid him in shares instead of cash.
Registered in September of 1996, Chat.com is also one of the older domains on the web.
OpenAI declined to say how much it paid for Chat.com.
It should be noted that despite the acquisition, the domain name has not changed hands since its sale last year, indicating that OpenAI is not hosting ChatGPT on Chat.com.
In July, AI companion startup Friend revealed to tech news site 404 Media that it had spent USD$1.8 million (approx. UGX6.6 billion) on buying the friend.com domain name to serve as the wearable’s website after raising just USD$2.5 million (approx. UGX9.17 billion) in funding.
“Premium domains are expensive, but it’s worth it,” Avi Schiffmann, founder of Friend, told 404 Media.
OpenAI is dropping more than USD$15.5 million (approx. UGX56.87 billion) of the USD$6.6 billion (approx. UGX24.215 trillion) raised to build ever-larger AI models. “We’ve raised $6.6B in new funding at a $157B post-money valuation to accelerate progress on our mission.” the company reported in a blog post last month.
See also: OpenAI has launched its search engine “ChatGPT Search”
