GoDaddy Buys M.dot, A Mobile Website-Building App, To Push Its Mobile And Freemium Businesses

GoDaddy, the web-hosting and domain registration giant, is taking one more step into the world of mobile, and another into offering small businesses a one-stop shop for all of their online activities with a freemium sweetener. Today, it is announcing the acquisition of M.dot, a startup that has developed an iOS mobile app that lets users create mobile websites from the app itself. Financial terms of the deal were not officially disclosed, but we have heard that the sale was in cash and stock and could be worth anywhere from $5 million to $25 million, likely to be around $15 million — depending on GoDaddy’s own IPO plans. This is GoDaddy’s first acquisition under its new CEO Blake Irving, who joined the company January 7, having previously held roles as chief product officer at Yahoo and a number of senior roles at Microsoft. The news was announced as GoDaddy opened up new offices in Sunnyvale. The acquisition is squarely aimed at expanding the kinds of products and services that GoDaddy offers to businesses, going beyond basic domain registration and hosting. In an interview with TechCrunch, Irving said that while GoDaddy expects M.dot to bring it “a ton of new customers,” GoDaddy also has some 54 million domains under management, “and a lot of them have asked for mobile help.” Expanding GoDaddy’s revenue streams is also a key part of what the company needs to impress investors in the event of an IPO (the company is currently privately controlled by KKR, Silverlake Venture Partners and Technology Crossover Ventures). Irving would not comment on when GoDaddy could or would seek to go public, except to note that “this is?definitely one of the logical conclusions when you consider GoDaddy’s double-digit revenue and Ebidta growth. I think that it?s something that we definitely will consider but we have no plan for a specific date. The company is well placed to make a decision like that in the next years — plural.” Dominik Balogh, who co-founded the company with Pavel Serbajlo, says that M.dot was not looking for an exit this early in the startup’s life. Both Balogh and Serbajlo, as well as three others working on M.dot, will join GoDaddy. First arriving in Silicon Valley from Europe in hopes of getting into Y Combinator — it didn’t make the cut in an April 2012 interview — M.dot opened for business in June 2012. Between

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