Donuts Inc.
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Type of site
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Private |
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| Founded | 2010 |
| Key people | Paul Stahura, CEO and Co-founder Jonathon Nevett, Co-founder |
| Industry | Internet |
| Website | donuts |
| Alexa rank |
 260,769 (November 2016[update]) |
Donuts Inc. runs new generic top-level domains (gTLDs) as made possible by ICANN's gTLD expansion program. It was co-founded by Paul Stahura, Jonathon Nevett, Richard Tindal, and Daniel Schindler. In April 2011, the company was in stealth mode and raising capital; based on the company's filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), Donuts raised US$1 million equity financing. Since then it has submitted 307 gTLD applications and secured an initial investment of $100 million in financing, and a subsequent round of an undisclosed amount though apparently it "almost doubles" its reserves. The second round of funding was earmarked specifically for gTLD auctions to resolve its 158 contention sets. The company's headquarters is located in Bellevue, Washington.
In September 2012, Donuts was ranked #14 in The Wall Street Journal's Top 50 Start-Ups for 2012. It was also the newest start-up on the list.
On June 5, 2012, Donuts announced that it submitted applications for 307 gTLDs, including IDN TLDs, and secured $100 million in capital from multibillion-dollar private equity and venture funds.
According to Daniel Schindler, one of Donuts' four co-founders, the company originally came up with a list of 3,000 prospective domain names. He said, "We made a long list of dictionary terms, in multiple languages and character sets. We created our own proprietary way of valuing the gTLDs, and that helped us narrow it down. But 307 is still a lot, obviously."
At one point, an article from Bloomberg reported that the company planned to apply for 10 gTLDs. Mason Cole, the company's Vice President of Communications and industry relations explained that the reporter from Bloomberg misunderstood or had miscommunication with Stahura. He said that at the time of the interview, the exact number of the gTLDs to be applied for hadn't been finalized. Mr. Cole also said that the company is well prepared to operate all the 307 gTLDs.
In terms of intellectual property rights protection, the company said that it created rights protection mechanisms for new gTLDs and it will implement an open Internet philosophy. According to Stahura, "The Internet is an engine of information, ideas and commerce, and one that’s not restrictive unnecessarily. Donuts intends to preserve that openness for all users, not operate a ‘by invitation only’ section of the Internet." This statement can be seen to reference the plans of other large portfolio applicants such as Google and Amazon, that are not only applying for brand TLDs for exclusive corporate use, but are also applying for generic terms with no plans to offer public registration.
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