Trafi.com Sold last month for $4k raises 500K in Seed Funding
How much are cash we leaving on the table?
Another story from TechCrunch.com today discusses the new service that has launched in Lithuania called Trafi.com, DnJournal.com reported the sale only last week for Trafi.com selling on Sedo.com for $4,000 USD. Today announces that Trafi.com has raised $500K in seed funding.
Could the seller have gotten more cash?
This is a question that is often asked by many domainers – Was Trafi.com another possible Five or Six Figure sale?
I don’t think it would have been a six figure sale personally but I do believe five figures would have been achievable if I was brokering the domain or another domain broker we would have looked into who were the possible buyers and we would have worked to drive the sale price higher.
Trafi already has 300,000 users in Lithuania and has aggressive plans to launch their app globally as the Go-To Transit App to the rest of world.
Trafi has been smart in acquiring the exact match Dot Com domain name to help further grow downloads of their app. However for a tech company they need to fix their web url redirection – If “Type in” Trafi.com you got the 404 Error page, The site only resolves if you “Type in” www.trafi.com
Trafi has also acquired many cctlds of Trafi i.e. Trafi.co.uk, Trafi.cn, Trafi.mx – That is another reason that makes be believe the price could have went higher if they are prepared to purchases several cctlds for hundreds of dollars in additional protection they might have went the step further in paying a more for the DOT COM.
I hope both the seller and buyer are happy with price, you can’t look to the past on every domain sale and you never know what is around the corner for your next domain sale but if you think you are struggling on think there could be still cash left of the table consult a domain name brokerage service or independent domain name broker.
Here is the story on TechCrunch.com & Here are the Trafi facts from CrunchBase.com
Lithuanian startup TRAFI is announcing a seed funding round of $500,000 U.S. today, provided by Practica Capital. In addition to the funding, former Nokia Maps chief Sylvain Grande is joining the board, and the company hopes to pursue a strategy of aggressive expansion in key markets not well covered by leading players like Google.
TRAFI already reaches over 300,000 unique users monthly in its launch market in Lithuania, providing commuters and travelers there with journey planning that seamlessly combines public transit, taxi, bicycle routes and walking, offering suggestions as to which modes will be most convenient and most expedient given real-time traffic information.
I asked TRAFI co-founder and CEO Martynas Gudonavičius why his startup has a chance to excel in a market where there’s already a lot of activity, and recently a fair amount of consolidation through acquisitions by Apple and others. He said that TRAFI is targeting opportunity specifically left on the table by the transit directions players you already know.
“Citymapper, Hopstop and those guys only work with open data which is pretty easy,” he said in an interview. “We are going different, harder way and using not only open data, but also data which is very complex and harder to obtain, especially in cities in less developed, emerging markets. Google transit only uses their own defined data feed formats, and if particular city doesn’t have it – Google doesn’t cover it. We do.”
TRAFI also offers distinctive features, including an “interesting” route suggestion algorithm that plugs into Foursquare’s API to provide suggestions of potential places to stop along the way. But the real opportunity is to serve markets that are underserved at the moment, and that’s where TRAFI’s expansion plans will take them.
“Expansion will be very aggressive in 2013/2014 and mainly focused on emerging markets around the world and multi-million population cities for example Sao Paulo, Mexico City, Moscow, etc.,” he said. “There is definitely a huge opportunity to grow in this market, it’s actually under-invested, especially in emerging markets where open data is still very rare and Google/Apple are not really well established.”
Currently, TRAFI is available on the web and on Android, but it’s undergoing a redesign and the team hopes to unveil its new look soon, ahead of trying to achieve a more global footprint.