Excl: Directi looking to raise up to $100M for Dubai-based domain registration arm Radix

Dubai-headquartered Radix FZC, a subsidiary of the Directi Group (which houses a group of businesses that develop mass-market Web products) is looking to raise around $50-100 million in funding for its registry operator business, Bhavin Turakhia, founder and CEO of Directi, told Techcircle.in in an exclusive interview.

The money will be used to purchase generic top-level domain names from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). The company has already applied for these domain names, Turakhia said.

In a process to expand the Internet naming system, ICANN has approved the creation of generic top-level domains (gTLDs) in January this year. Since then, a lot of companies have applied for domains ranging from anything like .hotel, .baby, .movie, .doctor and .home to .tata, .reliance and .sbi, among others. If two or more companies apply for the same name, they are provided with a grace period to settle who takes the name. If they are unable to reach a mutual decision, that domain name will be put up for auction and the companies can bid for it.

Turakhia said, "There is going to be an auction for those top-level domains sometime next year, and while we have our own reserves to participate in the auction, we may add to our reserves by raising additional funds. We haven't decided on the exact amount but it will lie in the $50-100 million range."

The combined product portfolio of various Directi businesses (ResellerClub, LogicBoxes, BigRock, Skenzo and Media.net) include communication and collaboration apps, social networking software, instant messaging software, context analysis engines, anti-spam and antivirus solutions, large-scale billing and provisioning platforms, traffic monetisation solutions, online advertising solutions, DNS management products, Linux and Windows server management software and Web hosting control panels, among others.

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(Edited by Sanghamitra Mandal)