A U.K. internet giant has decided to anchor its North American expansion efforts in the heart of D.C.
Nominet, which operates the .uk domain, on Friday will mark its official launch into the North American market by opening an office on K Street that will support a small but growing team of developers, researchers and sales staff.
The office, which CEO Russell Haworth said has seven employees and will add five or so in coming months, will focus on its relatively new cybersecurity business, Nominet NTX.
“The D.C. area has got some strong universities throwing out good graduates, and has been a hotbed of activity from a cyber perspective, so it’s a good region to start out in,” he said in an interview.
Launched in 1996 as a public benefit organization, Nominet was one of the first domain management groups and helped define the standards that influence how other registries operate. It has also been officially designated part of the U.K.’s Critical National Infrastructure for its work operating and securing the .uk domain space.
Nominet NTX, a separate division of the firm, predicts risks at the DNS level – an area few internet companies have more experience in. In 2017, it claims, it analyzed over 3 terabytes of data across the U.K. public sector and blocked 2.5 million malicious requests.
Haworth said the company has about $45 million in revenue, 80 percent of which comes from its domain management services. It has two other offices, in London and Oxford, and 250 employees.
“It feels like running a startup within a 22-year-old company,” he said, “because we’re hiring new people and shifting the gravity of our business from the domain management business to an organization that is growing more and more through enterprise software.”
Using the same technology deployed to protect critical national infrastructure, the company’s reach also extends into the private sector, ranging from financial services and healthcare to telecommunications and retail. Haworth said its first client acquisition efforts in North America include internet service providers, but the company’s eye is also on government agencies like the DoE and Do, as well as private pharmaceutical and financial enterprises.
The U.S. cybersecurity industry is more competitive than the U.K.’s, Haworth said – Nominet research says Brits almost twice as long on average to find threats – but the size of the market was impossible to ignore once the firm began commercializing its cybersecurity expertise.
Though it is profitable, the company hasn’t strayed completely away from its roots as a public benefit company. It has contributed close to $60 million in the past decade to charitable projects, and recently partnered with the Learning Foundation to launch a task force aimed at tackling digital exclusion in the U.K.
