Upgrades to Clara.com while another misses out — One Clara

The firm that used clara.cc upgraded to .com.

First names are becoming more popular options as brand names. Earlier this year, Crunchbase identified first names as a trend in branding, citing successful firms like Mona, Marvin, or Otto. There’s also Alan, the unicorn digital health brand, and Jerry, the well-funded AI brand.

Here’s another example, and it shows how, when your name is common, you need to be the first to strike.

This month, a London-based firm called Clara raised $3.5 million to add to its $2.1 million of existing funding. The legal services provider has been around since 2018, and with this funding, you might think that a domain name upgrade would be on the cards, which would see Clara moving from Clara.co to Clara.com.

But it’s too late. That firm has been beaten to the punch by another Clara, an end-to-end spend management provider for firms in Latin America. This Clara has raised $158.5 million in funding since forming in 2020, counting a $70 million Series B round closed in December 2021. In this instance, the brand name Clara is more likely to mean “clear” in Spanish.

The firm has upgraded from Clara.cc to Clara.com and transitioned its website to its fresh domain.

Clara.com changed hands three years ago when domain investment portfolio Telepathy, Inc. purchased the name from its previous owner, a defunct startup.

As stated by Whois history, Clara purchased Clara.com earlier this year, with the domain moving from Dynadot to a privacy-protected GoDaddy account in February 2022.

Since Clara is a firm targeting an international audience across much of South America, it makes perfect sense for the firm to invest in its exact-match .com, the globally recognized gTLD.

Updates: Media Options brokered the deal. The domain was once defended in a UDRP.