Internet Brands

What does Internet Brands own?
It owns WebMD, Medscape, PulsePoint, FindLaw, Avvo, Martindale-Hubbell, Nolo, Super Lawyers, CarsDirect, Fodor's Travel, Healthwise, Limeade, and a stake in the Henry Schein ONE dental software venture.

Is Internet Brands publicly traded?
No. It traded on NASDAQ as INET until Hellman and Friedman took it private in 2010. KKR has controlled it since 2014, alongside Warburg Pincus and Temasek.

Who founded Internet Brands?
The company began as CarsDirect in 1998 inside Bill Gross's idealab! incubator in Pasadena, California, and renamed itself Internet Brands in 1999. Robert Brisco has been CEO since 1999.

Where is Internet Brands headquartered?
Internet Brands is headquartered at 909 North Pacific Coast Highway in El Segundo, California, with more than 20 offices globally including New York, San Francisco, and international locations.

How many brands does Internet Brands own?
The company operates dozens of properties, with the major ones being WebMD, Medscape, FindLaw, Avvo, Martindale-Hubbell, Nolo, CarsDirect, and Fodor's across health, legal, automotive, and travel verticals.

Who owns Internet Brands?
Private equity firms KKR, Warburg Pincus, and Temasek own Internet Brands, with KKR holding control. The legal entity is MH Sub I, LLC.

The company began as CarsDirect, founded in 1998 inside Bill Gross's idealab! incubator in Pasadena. CarsDirect sold cars online at fixed prices, one of the first e-commerce plays in auto retail. As that business matured, the company renamed itself Internet Brands in 1999 to reflect a broader strategy of building and buying vertical websites.

Internet Brands went public on NASDAQ in 2007 under the ticker INET, by then operating dozens of community forums, automotive sites, and early health properties. Its acquisition playbook was consistent: buy established niche websites cheaply, standardize their technology and ad sales, and fold them into a shared platform.

Hellman and Friedman took the company private in 2010 for $640 million. Under H&F it began the shift from pure media toward software and services, buying vertical SaaS businesses that monetized professional audiences its sites aggregated. KKR acquired a controlling stake in 2014, with Warburg Pincus and Temasek investing alongside in subsequent years.

The defining deal came in July 2017, when Internet Brands bought WebMD Health Corp for approximately $2.8 billion, acquiring WebMD and Medscape in one transaction and making health its largest vertical. WebMD continued acquiring under its umbrella: Aptus Health in 2019, StayWell and Krames in 2020, ADDitude in 2021, Mercury Healthcare in 2022, French medical site Jim.fr in 2022, Limeade and Spain's Grupo Saned in 2023, and Healthwise's operating assets in 2024.

In the legal vertical, the company assembled FindLaw (acquired from Thomson Reuters in 2024), Avvo, Martindale-Hubbell, Nolo, and Super Lawyers into the largest legal marketing and directory group in the US. Dental software joint venture Henry Schein ONE, formed with Henry Schein, anchors its healthcare provider software presence.

Through 2025 and 2026, lender attention has focused on the company's debt load and the threat AI search poses to its traffic-dependent media properties, though fourth-quarter 2025 revenue grew 8 percent to $695 million with adjusted EBITDA up 5 percent to $273 million.

Internet Brands' primary public scrutiny is financial rather than legal. Credit press coverage in 2025 and 2026 documented falling loan prices, lender organizing concerns, and KKR's reported warning to creditors about coordinating with advisors, all stemming from the leveraged capital structure and AI-related traffic risk.

WebMD properties periodically face criticism over sponsored health content and the blending of editorial and pharmaceutical advertising, a long-running debate in health media. The company has faced no major regulatory penalties of public record in recent years.