New startup-funding data from Atom shows .AI on 12.8% of the funded companies in its resolved-domain dataset. .COM remains comfortably dominant overall, but .AI is now the clear second-place extension in the tracker and has an unusually high exact-match rate.
Ech’s short answer
In Atom’s latest 11 September snapshot, 339 funded-startup rounds were associated with a live .AI domain, equal to 12.8% of the 2,655 rounds where a company domain was resolved. .COM still leads at 60.9%, but .AI is far ahead of the next extension in the table.
.AI has become the clear number-two domain extension among funded startups in Atom’s live funding tracker. The latest 11 September 2026 snapshot shows .AI on 339 of 2,655 rounds where Atom resolved the company’s live domain, giving the extension a 12.8% share of that dataset.
.COM remains in a different league overall, appearing on 1,616 resolved domains and accounting for 60.9%. But the gap between .AI and other alternatives is substantial: .IO sits at 4%, while .CO is below 3% in the same snapshot.
The more interesting finding may be how deliberately startups appear to be using .AI. Atom reports that 86.7% of the .AI cohort owns an exact-match domain, compared with 69.7% of the .COM cohort. That suggests many funded companies using .AI are not simply settling for it because their preferred .COM is unavailable.
Atom says it ingests funding rounds from public coverage, resolves each company’s live domain and calculates percentages only where the relevant field can be resolved. Its tracker updates hourly, so the counts can move as new rounds are added.
The latest extension table gives .AI a much larger share than .IO, .CO and the long tail of other alternatives, although .COM remains the overall market leader.
Atom’s 11 September snapshot tracked 2,974 funding rounds in total and had resolved a live company domain for 2,655 of them. Within that resolved group, .COM accounted for 1,616 rounds and .AI for 339.
That puts .AI at 12.8% of the resolved-domain dataset. .IO was a distant third at 4%, with .CO at roughly 2.7% and .ORG at 1.8%. In other words, .AI is not challenging .COM across the whole startup market yet, but it has clearly separated itself from the other non-.COM choices in this particular funding dataset.
1,616 rounds
60.9% share
69.7% exact match
339 rounds
12.8% share
86.7% exact match
105 rounds
4.0% share
83.8% exact match
73 rounds
About 2.7% share
82.2% exact match
It refers to rounds in Atom’s tracker where the company’s live domain was resolved. It should not be read as proof that 12.8% of every funded startup in the world uses .AI.
Atom’s exact-match data is one of the strongest signs that .AI is increasingly being selected as a primary brand address rather than merely as a fallback.
Atom reports an 86.7% exact-match ownership rate for funded startups using .AI. That is notably higher than the 69.7% rate shown for .COM companies in the same extension table.
The .AI cohort also has a median second-level domain length of seven characters, compared with 10 characters for .COM. Its median disclosed funding round is $12 million, versus $10.8 million for .COM in the latest snapshot.
None of that proves a .AI domain causes a company to raise more money. Funding stage, sector, geography and company quality matter far more. What the data does show is that funded companies using .AI frequently have a short domain that exactly matches the brand they are operating under.
More than eight in ten .AI companies in Atom’s cohort use the exact brand match.
The typical .AI second-level name in the table is shorter than the .COM median.
The median disclosed round for the .AI cohort is $12 million in the snapshot.
The figures describe the companies in Atom’s dataset. They do not show that choosing .AI improves fundraising odds, nor that a short .AI domain automatically has high resale value.
The extension becomes much more prominent when the dataset is narrowed from all funded startups to companies classified in the AI vertical.
Atom’s vertical analysis has recently shown .AI on about 41% of funded AI companies, compared with roughly 39.5% on .COM. That is a very different picture from the overall dataset, where .COM still holds more than three-fifths of resolved domains.
The same analysis shows .AI appearing disproportionately in other technology-heavy groups too, including robotics and cybersecurity. That supports the idea that the extension’s strength is concentrated rather than universal: it is particularly attractive when “AI” is part of the company’s product, positioning or identity.
Despite its global use by artificial-intelligence companies, .AI is a country-code top-level domain. IANA lists the Government of Anguilla as the ccTLD manager.
The data strengthens the case that .AI has become a mainstream startup-branding option in its niche, but it does not make every .AI name valuable by default.
A startup choosing between an awkward .COM workaround and a clean exact-match .AI can point to a growing group of funded companies already operating on the extension. The exact-match figure is particularly relevant because it suggests many businesses are building their brand directly around the .AI address.
Strong adoption does not mean every available keyword in .AI is investable. The companies in Atom’s dataset tend to favour concise names, and exact-match ownership is common. That puts more emphasis on genuinely strong words, short brands and names with an obvious connection to AI products or companies.
The biggest number in the table remains 60.9%. .COM is still the default extension across the broader funded-startup sample, while .AI’s strength is concentrated in a fast-growing technology niche. The two findings can be true at the same time.
Atom says the tracker is updated hourly from public funding coverage. The percentages quoted here reflect the latest 11 September 2026 snapshot available when this article was prepared and may change as more rounds are added or domains are resolved.
Bottom line
In Atom’s latest resolved-domain dataset, .AI is used by 12.8% of funded startups and 86.7% of the .AI cohort owns its exact brand match. .COM remains dominant overall, but among AI companies the gap can disappear entirely. The strongest takeaway is not that .AI replaces .COM — it is that .AI has become a serious primary-domain choice for funded technology companies operating in the AI market.
