Marc Lore-backed Wizard Purchased Wizard.com
Firm that just raised $50 million also purchased Wizard.com.
Funding for AI-related startups is at an all-time high. As stated by information gathered by Statista, AI funding reached around $20 billion in Q2 2021. This year is set to eclipse 2020’s total funding of $36 billion by quite some way, indicating that venture capitalists are keen to back firms advancing our use of artificial intelligence.
A total of $50 million has just been added to the 2021 tally thanks to a Series A funding round disclosed the prior week by Wizard Commerce Inc. This startup describes itself as “transforming e-commerce with conversational AI.”
Roughly translated, Wizard is allowing brands and retailers to sell to its clients via text message.
Marc Lore, the former CEO of Walmart US Ecommerce, is among Wizard’s backers.
Lore also owned and operated Jet.com, an e-commerce platform sold to Walmart for $3.3 billion. It seems that Marc Lore is a fan of great domain names for his own ventures and for firms he invests in.
Recently, Lore invested in Tornado, which purchased Tornado.com from Brent Oxley in 2021. Now, Wizard has used some of its $50 million funding round to acquire Wizard.com.
The Wizard.com domain name was previously owned by Telepathy, Inc., a domain investment firm owned and operated by Nat Cohen. As stated by WHOIS history, Wizard.com moved from Telepathy’s possession in December 2020 when it transferred to a GoDaddy account.
Wizard.com remained dormant until recently, when a simple “coming soon” page appeared on the domain.
Crunchbase notes that Wizard was founded on September 1st, 2021, but a TechCrunch article suggests that Wizard isn’t as fresh as it seems. As stated by the article, Wizard’s CEO previously ran Stylust, a text-based shopping platform, a concept that sounds similar.
Wizard reportedly purchased Stylust, with the entire Wizard staff aside from some recent C-suite additions being ex-Stylust employees.
Whether this is a brand fresh firm or not, acquiring an ultra-premium domain name such as Wizard.com ahead of officially launching is a strong move that signals the firm’s ambitions and intentions.
