After 20 years, DomainTools takes its first VC dough

DomainTools has taken a “significant” investment from a venture capital firm, the first outside funding its received in its 20-year history.

The amount of the investment is undisclosed, but DomainTools said its investor is Battery Ventures.

Battery already owns stakes in numerous software and technology companies, but this appears to be its first foray into the domain name space.

Its principal, Jordan Welu, and partner Dave Tabors will join DomainTools’ board of directors and Andy Rothery, a Battery “executive-in-residence”, will become its executive chairman.

DomainTools said in a press release:

This investment will drive more rapid innovation in DomainTools’ platform capabilities for machine learning-based threat analytics and predictive risk scoring, along with enhanced product development around automating threat intelligence and incident response workflows.

The company is all about the “threat intelligence” nowadays, no doubt partly due to the fact that its original mission of aggregating the world’s Whois data will become decreasingly useful in light of privacy laws such as GDPR.

As a private company its financial position is unknown, but I’ll note that it did take a big chunk of change out of the US taxpayers’ pocket earlier this year under a government coronavirus-related corporate-relief program.

About Battery Ventures

Battery partners with exceptional founders and management teams developing category-defining businesses in markets including software and services, enterprise infrastructure, online marketplaces, healthcare IT and industrial technology. Founded in 1983, the firm backs companies at all stages, ranging from seed and early to growth and buyout, and covers technology markets from six strategic locations including Boston; San Francisco and Menlo Park, Calif.; Herzliya, Israel; London; and New York.

About DomainTools

DomainTools empowers security professionals to get ahead of attacks by identifying attacker infrastructure, getting immediate context and visibility on threats, and making faster risk assessments, thereby dramatically improving the security posture of their organization. Fortune 1000 companies, global government agencies, and leading security solution vendors use the DomainTools platform as a critical ingredient in their threat investigation and mitigation work.