Space tickets, gemstones and Gmail: ‘Biggest business you’ve never heard of’ behind $5.6 billion in deals

It’s used to buy and sell everything that’s “complex and expensive”, from boats and planes to space station tickets, gemstones and exotic animals.

But despite processing more than $5.6 billion in deals, including the sale of some of the internet’s biggest domain names including Twitter, Gmail and Instagram, it’s the “biggest fintech you’ve never heard of”.

Matt Barrie reckons they “should have added a few zeros” to the $10 million sale price of little-known US website Escrow.com when he snapped it up three years ago.

Escrow.com, as the name suggests, provides online escrow services for e-commerce platforms by holding payment between buyer and seller until a transaction is completed.

Its commercial partners include Shopify, GoDaddy and AutoTrader.

It was started in 1999 by US mortgage services firm Fidelity National Financial, which traded it to software company iLumin three years later. In 2004, it was acquired by a California-based private investor who sold it to Freelancer.com in early 2016 for $US7.5 million.

“It was a bargain,” says Mr Barrie, Freelancer’s founder and chief executive, who says the purchase was a combination of “luck and timing”.

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Source: Space tickets, gemstones and Gmail: ‘Biggest business you’ve never heard of’ behind $5.6 billion in deals