Icon.com Sold for $12 Million in 6th Largest Publicly Reported Domain Sale of All Time
In a post on LinkedIn today Icon CEO Kennan Davison revealed that his company paid $12 million to acquire the exact match domain for their artificial intelligence based startup. The sale was made by Andrew Miller (ATM Holdings and Managing Director for Hilco Digital Assets) with Lumis.com representing the buyer. This is the 6th highest publicly reported domain sale since we began tracking the market in 2003 and just the latest of many landmark sales that Miller has helped orchestrate (details of which are in a DNJournal Cover Story profile of Andrew that we published in April of last year).
Acquiring this premier asset was a bold and decisive move by Davison who, based on his post, clearly believes in the go big or go home philosophy. Kennan stated, "I know I’m not supposed to say this publicly, but I want to make Icon the greatest company of all time. I want to deliver insane value to our customers. I want to create generational wealth for my team and investors. I want to break the $0 to $100M ARR world record!"
Those are obviously lofty goals but many of the greatest business success stories of all time began with the leader of a company understanding how valuable a great domain name can be to the enterprise in the long run - and acting to acquire it. So, we are in Kennan's corner on this move.
Regarding Icon's product, Davison describes it as "the world’s first AI CMO (Chief Marketing Officer): it can plan, create and run 1000s of winning ads end-to-end." He added, "We're backed by Peter Thiel's Founders Fund and execs of frontier AI labs like OpenAI (ChatGPT), Cognition and Pika
No one knows exactly how the Icon story will play out from from here but, given Davison's stated goals and this key acquisition of Icon.com, he has commanded people's attention, guaranteeing a lot of us will be closely following the company's iconic journey in the months and years ahead.
We will be charting the Icon.com sale and adding it to our YTD Top 100 Sales Chart when our next bi-weekly report comes out Wednesday evening, April 30. The eight-figure blockbuster is more than five times higher than the top 2025 sale prior to Icon.com.