OpenAI has acquired the chat.com domain, which now redirects to ChatGPT. This was announced by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, who posted a simple link to the domain.
The domain was previously owned by Dharmesh Shah, founder and CTO of HubSpot. In early 2023, Shah purchased chat.com for $15.5 million. However, just a few months later, he announced the sale of the domain without disclosing the details of the deal or the buyer. He confirmed that he sold the domain for a higher amount than he originally paid. “The reason I bought chat.com is simple: I believe that a chat-based user interface is the next big step in software development,” Shah wrote in a LinkedIn post at the time.
After the article was published, Shah confirmed that OpenAI had indeed acquired the domain from him, hinting that the startup paid him in shares.
