History
AllBusiness was founded in 1999 by San Francisco lawyer Richard Harroch, and within a year grew to more than 100 employees. During this time, San Francisco entrepreneur Keith Belling served as president, joined later by Teymour Boutros-Ghali (a nephew of former UN Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali) as CEO. It was acquired by NBCi, the Internet venture of NBC, a subsidiary of General Electric, in March 2000 for $225 million USD. At the time, it was one of the largest purchases of a dot-com company. NBCi merged AllBusiness with an independent Internet company, BigVine.com, in November 2000 and the combined entity assumed the name AllBusiness.
The combined AllBusiness entity remained intact through April 2002 until being broken up and sold to various buyers, including Harroch, who bought back the original core assets of AllBusiness at that time.
AllBusiness is one of the few companies that survived the early Internet frenzy, the burst of the dot-com bubble and a slow recovery of the Internet publishing industry. AllBusiness raised $10 million USD in a series B round of venture capital funding in July 2004 (drawing only $5 million) and $12.4 million USD in a series C round of funding in February 2006.
In December 2007, Dun & Bradstreet acquired AllBusiness for $55 million USD. Today AllBusiness.com is part of D&B Digital, a group responsible for the free, advertising-supported Web sites owned by D&B. The site now offers more than twenty million pieces of business content including articles, periodicals, videos, blogs and legal forms and agreements.
In January 2012 AllBusiness laid off its staff and Dunn and Bradstreet put the domain up for sale. There have been no new postings on the site since January 2012, and all of the phone numbers on the AllBusiness.com contact page have been disconnected. On March 31, 2012, Dunn and Bradstreet reported on their form 10-Q that they had sold the AllBusiness.com domain to e-personalfinance.com for $400,000.
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