Who Owns GoDaddy?

Bob Parsons founded the company in 1997 in Phoenix, Arizona as Jomax Technologies, funded from the $64 million sale of his earlier company, Parsons Technology, to Intuit. When ICANN opened the domain registration market to competition in 1999, Jomax became a registrar and renamed itself GoDaddy.com, a name chosen for being easy to remember.

Cheap pricing and loud marketing built the brand. GoDaddy undercut incumbent Network Solutions on domain prices and advertised relentlessly, including a run of deliberately provocative Super Bowl commercials that made it one of the most recognized internet brands in America. It passed Network Solutions to become the largest ICANN-accredited registrar by 2005 and never gave up the lead.

Parsons sold majority control to KKR, Silver Lake, and Technology Crossover Ventures in 2011. The sponsors professionalized operations, expanded the product line beyond domains into hosting, website building, and email, and took the company public in April 2015. Blake Irving led the IPO era, repositioning the brand away from its edgy advertising history, and Aman Bhutani, a former Expedia executive, became CEO in 2019.

The modern strategy is monetization depth over customer volume. GoDaddy launched its Airo AI product suite in 2023, expanded aftermarket domain sales and commerce tools, and prioritized average revenue per user growth as customer counts plateaued. Fiscal 2025 produced record revenue of $4.95 billion on about 81 million domains under management, roughly 21 percent of every registered domain on the internet.