Endurance International Group, formerly BizLand, is an IT services company specializing in Web hosting. The company was founded in 1997 and is headquartered in Burlington, Massachusetts, USA. It achieved its size by acquiring a large number of smaller companies, which it continues to operate under the original brand names, while moving their IT infrastructure to India. In 2011, Endurance was bought from Accel-KKR by Warburg Pincus and GS Capital Partners, for around $975 million. In September 2013, the company announced plans to raise $400 million in an IPO. The company announced it would list on the NASDAQ under the ticker symbol EIGI. It went public in October 2013 raising $252 million selling shares to the public at $12 each. This was below the company's target goal of $400 million. In a 2015 investor earnings conference call, the company reported having 4.2 million worldwide customers. This path to increased size is similar to the path networking company Verio followed in the 1990s, using free cash flow and access to capital markets in acquiring assets to add to their corporate portfolio. The concept was to roll up small ISPs into one large national ISP and achieve economies of scale. Endurance is acquiring hosting companies domestically and internationally. Blake Cunneen, Endurance's senior vice president of corporate development has stated:
"Investing in mergers and acquisitions is a very accretive use of free cash flow and going forward we'll continue to do so. We don't have any deals we're announcing. But we told the Street to expect M&A growth to continue.
In March 2015, the company announced an investment in Netherlands-based technology startup AppMachine, acquiring 40% of the company. In August 2015, EIG announced the acquisition of Site5 and Verio Web Hosting from NTT. It is estimated that EIG gained 86,000+ new subscribers through these acquisitions. In November 2015, the company acquired Constant Contact, and days later laid off 15% of their workforce. Also in November 2015, EIG acquired the assets of Ecommerce, LLC for $28 million. This acquisition included a total of 72,000 subscribers from three different hosting brands: IX Web Hosting, Cloud by IX, and Host Excellence. In August 2018, the firm's CEO and CFO were fined US$8 million for fraud by the SEC for misrepresenting company subscriber numbers.
Company structure
Although now one of the Internet's largest Web hosting providers, the company is structured differently than other large hosting companies such as Rackspace, GoDaddy, or 1&1 Ionos. The company has grown its hosting and related business through numerous acquisitions.
Subsidiary brands
The company owns and operates numerous hosting businesses, with shared support information and support agents. A partial list of these 83 EIG brands include: Endurance acquired Ecomdash in October 2019, for $9.6 Million in cash and placed under the Constant Contact group.
