.founder
Is .founder a real TLD? Who’s applying to run it?
.founder is not contested. One application for it is on ICANN’s Reveal Day list, as of 7 October 2026. It is Radix.
A personal-brand address for startup founders; nice to have, but real companies and most founders will keep their main site elsewhere.
startup founders building a personal brand (bio sites, newsletters, angel/advisor pages), plus communities and tools marketed to founders
One of 46 ICANN 2026-round applications Radix announced on its own applications page. Radix states it intends to build and operate each TLD it wins.
The 2012 applications making the most similar bet. Chosen by AI from every string in that round, without being told what happened to any of them.
Same bet exactly: a self-conferred business role title that an individual hangs their personal identity on, with no licensing body to gate it, so the registry is selling status signaling to a small population of people who already introduce themselves by that word.
Also a profession-as-personal-identity string bought one-per-person for a portfolio or personal site rather than by a company, though the occupation is externally recognized craft rather than a self-declared status you can assume the day you incorporate.
The other half of the .founder bet — an aspirational, self-awarded label with zero verification, sold on how the buyer wants to be perceived rather than on any category of goods or service, which makes credibility (anyone can claim it) the same core risk.
What a .founder domain is
.founder is not a TLD yet. It is a string on our record of the ICANN 2026 new gTLD round, in our AI & tech category. One application for it is on ICANN’s Reveal Day list.
Is the .founder domain extension real yet?
.founder is not yet a domain extension you can register: nothing resolves under it, and no registrar sells names in it. It is a string applicants have put forward in the ICANN 2026 new gTLD round, the process that decides whether it becomes one.
When can you buy a .founder domain?
You can’t yet. A .founder name can only be registered once the string is delegated (added to the DNS root) and its registry opens. Last round's closest parallel to .founder was .ceo, delegated on 28 December 2013.
Is .founder a real TLD?
Not yet. .founder is not in the DNS root, so nothing resolves under it. It’s here because .founder is on ICANN’s Reveal Day list of applied-for strings. Every entry on this page links to its source.
- Band: 30-49, usable but limited. The buyer is real — founder identity is a strong cultural label in the startup world, and a persona site, newsletter, or founder-community product on .founder is plausible as an actual end use, which keeps it out of the 10-29 vanity band; the applicant is also a large portfolio registry that states it intends to operate what it wins, which by analogy with broad-channel registries supports volume distribution. It does not reach the 50-69 niche-standard band because, by analogy with title-based persona TLDs (.ceo, .guru, .expert — flagged as analogy), demand for job-title namespaces has historically skewed toward one-off vanity registrations with weak renewal identity and a thin aftermarket, and because founders' primary properties (their companies) will remain on mainstream company TLDs, leaving .founder a secondary identity at best. The string is also long, which by analogy weakens memorability against short incumbents. Main market uncertainty: whether founder personal-brand sites become a normalized, durable behavior (a link-in-bio-style default) or remain an occasional vanity purchase — that distinction is the difference between the top and bottom of this band.