What became of 653 software vendors we first listed in 2020

What became of 653 software vendors we first listed in 2020

This week we re-read 653 software vendors that entered our catalogue in December 2020, one at a time, from their own websites. Every one of them had been imported with a name, usually a web address, and no profile text. Of the 653, 442 still trade under the name we had for them, with no new owner mentioned anywhere on their pages. Ninety-two now belong to another company or are sold as part of one, and two more have announced a sale that their pages do not yet describe as complete. Thirteen have renamed themselves without changing hands. Seventeen have closed or ended the product, each on a statement we could read: the business's own, its buyer's, or in one case the public register. For 46 we found nothing current at all, and 41 we could not settle and have set aside for a second look.

Put another way, roughly one vendor in four (170 of the 653) is no longer what a record written in 2020 says it is. Among the 549 that are still trading, about one in six (94) now answers to another company or has agreed to. And some of our records were out of date on the day they were imported: twelve of the ownership changes that the vendors' pages date are dated 2020 or earlier, and one of the renames, mindWireless to Mindglobal, was announced in October 2020, weeks before the import ran.

What we counted, and how

The 653 are company listings that arrived in our catalogue in one software-vendor import in December 2020 and had no profile text of their own. Between 25 and 26 September 2026 we worked through them in eleven batches, in the order our work queue put them, and gave each one a single outcome. That order is not random. It follows the import's own grouping, so the vendors came in runs of software categories: art-gallery systems, therapy-practice software, CAD, whiteboards and wireframing tools, winery software, telecom expense management, church software, yoga and fitness studios, zoo and attraction systems, VPNs, business phone systems, online voting, waste management, video conferencing and video interviewing, virtual data rooms, virtual events and tours, travel, trucking, treasury, tutoring and trust accounting, and on the second day user research, utility billing, vacation rentals, veterinary practice software, event ticketing, time tracking and learning management. A different slice of the catalogue could give different proportions. Some of these categories have seen a lot of buying and selling, and we would not read 14 per cent as a figure for the software industry.

The four outcomes mean specific things:

• Rewritten (549). The business was live and its own pages supported a profile. We wrote one in the third person from those pages as they read that day. Where a site refused automated reads, its own pages were read as indexed by search.
• Retired (17). The business, or the company that bought it, stated that it had closed or that the product had ended. The listing stays as a marked record of a business that existed.
• Removed (46). Nothing current could be found: the domain was gone, parked, for sale or serving someone else, and a search by name turned up only directory copies and old press. Removed means we could not find the business, not that we proved it closed.
• Left (41). The evidence pointed two ways, or the listing raised a question about whether it belonged in a business directory at all. These wait for a second check.

The counts are of companies. The same batches also retired 16 product listings and removed 47, almost all of them products of the retired and removed vendors, and rewrote one: the TrackX Yard product, which FourKites bought in 2020 and now sells as Dynamic Yard.

"Part of another company" means the vendor's own pages, or its new owner's, say so in words such as acquired, merged, now part of, sold by, or a division or brand of. We did not count investors or private equity backing, an operator named only on a contact page or in a copyright line, or mergers in which the vendor is the surviving name. Ten borderline cases were read and left out on those grounds, so 92 is a floor, not an estimate.

Ninety-two new owners, and what their pages say

The 92 split almost evenly. Forty-eight now point to the owner's own site or are sold under the owner's name. Panopta's old address leads to Fortinet's FortiMonitor page. OP5 is sold as ITRS OP5 Monitor, Akana as Perforce Akana, Fyde as Barracuda CloudGen Access, Changepoint as Planview ChangePoint and Wastedge as AMCS Wastedge. Dropsuite says its website has been retired and its technology continues as NinjaOne SaaS Backup. The other 44 keep their own name and site and name the owner on them. CoStar Group completed its acquisition of Matterport on 28 February 2025. Adobe completed its purchase of Semrush on 28 April 2026. SevenRooms describes itself as a DoorDash company, Waitwhile says Allegion acquired it in July 2025, and Weebly and Loom say they are part of Square and Atlassian.

Forty-four of the 92 give a year for the deal. Twelve are dated 2020 or earlier, nine 2021, six 2022, one 2023, six 2024, six 2025 and four so far in 2026. The rest name the owner without saying when. The earliest ones matter most for anyone holding an old supplier record. Amtel was bought by NetPlus in 2016, Service Software by Verisk in 2017, Avanti by Ricoh in 2017, and TunnelBear by McAfee in 2018. A record copied in 2020 had them wrong from the start.

Some chains run two deep. CashAnalytics was acquired by GTreasury in September 2024, and GTreasury has since been acquired by Ripple. ClickSend was bought by MessageMedia in 2019, and the two joined the Sinch Group in 2022. AlienVault went to AT&T in 2018, and its products are now run by LevelBlue. For a customer of any of them, the company on the other side of the contract may have changed twice without the product's name changing at all.

The redirects are what hide this. When a buyer types an old address and lands on a working product page, nothing looks wrong. Of the 88 vendors whose web address now sits on a different domain, 46 forward to the new owner's site. Omni-ID's old address leads to HID's page announcing that Omni-ID is part of HID, viziya.com leads to Prometheus Group, and chalk.com forwards to PowerSchool's Curriculum & Instruction product.

The owners' own promises are worth reading closely. Semrush told customers there would be no immediate changes to their services, agreements or contacts. Mitratech said account management, services and support for Prevalent customers would continue without immediate change. Better Impact says HandsOn Connect will stay fully supported and that no customer will have to migrate. Octave says BricsCAD keeps the same platform, roadmap, licensing and support. Most of these promises say "immediate", and none of them gives an end date. That is the word a buyer should notice.

Sixteen renames, three of them after a sale

Sixteen vendors now use a genuinely different name, and in each case the business, or the company that bought it, says so. MessageBird rebranded as Bird in February 2024. UsabilityHub renamed itself Lyssna in October 2023, and says it kept the same leadership team and product mission. CityGro announced in August 2022 that it was becoming Patch, after 12 years under the old name. concrete5 dropped the 5 at version 9 in 2021 and is now Concrete CMS. Hotel Engine took the name Engine in 2024. Panoskin is now TourBuilder, TurnoverBnB is Turno, Elecosoft is Eleco, KMIT Solutions is Wild Republic Tech, Home One Warranty is Warranty Base, and KEY2ACT has gone back to the WennSoft name it used before. BookingSync now sells as Smily, and its site states that the service is still operated by BookingSync SAS. So the brand changed and the legal entity did not, which is the detail a contract cares about.

Three of the sixteen renames came with a change of owner. Bricsys became Octave BricsCAD when Hexagon spun off several software businesses as Octave. Travelstop became WegoPro after joining Wego in 2023, and Changepoint became Planview ChangePoint.

We also corrected 36 names to the spelling, capitals or form the business uses itself, from SEMrush to Semrush and Verbit Software to Verbit. That is housekeeping, but it matters for search. A buyer looking for a supplier by the name on an old invoice may not find the current site.

Just as telling are the renames we did not make. In at least seven of the 41 listings left undecided, the old address forwards to a business with a different name, and neither side says whether it was a rename, a sale or a new firm taking over a lapsed domain. A redirect alone does not tell us, so we did not rename them on a guess.

Addresses: 140 records needed more than tidying

The web address on our 2020 record had to change for 217 of the 549 vendors still trading. For 77 the change was cosmetic: a move to https, a www prefix or a trailing slash. The other 140 needed more. Eighty-eight had moved to a different domain altogether, 46 of them to a new owner's site and 42 to another address with no new owner stated. Fifty-two stayed on the same domain but had been recorded against a deep page or a sub-site rather than the home page, or had arrived in the import carrying referral tracking tags. A deep page is the first thing to break when a vendor redesigns its site. A record that points to the home page lasts longer.

How the seventeen closures were announced

Thirteen of the retirements rest on the business's own words. InVision's notice gave 31 December 2024 as the last day of its design collaboration services, and invisionapp.com now leads to Miro. Tauria's site says its video conferencing service was permanently discontinued from 1 June 2026. YogaTrail announced that it closed on 1 March 2025 after about ten years. Weemss closed its event ticketing service to concentrate on another product, taking no new events after 14 October 2022 and shutting down on 17 October 2023. Oak Bay Technologies says it no longer offers any of its products for sale or delivery.

Three rest on the statement of a company that bought the business or took over its customers. TrueCommerce announced that it would retire SmartTurn on 1 July 2024, and smartturn.com is now a parked domain for sale. Vimeo, which bought Livestream, ended broadcasting and subscriptions on the legacy platform on 3 February 2025 and closed its videos in June 2025. Every path on ibVPN's domain now forwards to a StrongVPN page telling ibVPN users that their accounts have moved. One, StarLeaf, rests on public records alone. It went into administration in June 2022 and was dissolved in September 2024, according to the Gazette and Companies House, and its old domain now serves an unrelated blog.

What stands out is how quickly the notices themselves disappear. We read SmartTurn's sunset notice from an archived copy, and did the same for RawShorts and Weemss. Tadcon's statement that it had been dissolved came through search copies of its own site, which now shows only a hosting placeholder. YogaTrail's page blocks automated reads, so we read it through search results, and Sympli's shutdown notice survives in its code repository after its domain stopped resolving. A buyer who needs evidence that a supplier has closed, for an audit or an insurance claim, should save the notice on the day it appears.

Forty-six with nothing current, and why that is not the same as closed

For the 46 removals, the reasons break down as follows. Nine domains no longer resolve. Eleven sites could not be reached or answered only with errors: timeouts, refused connections, server errors on every path, a 404 on every page, or a broken certificate. Ten domains are parked or offered for sale. Six now serve someone else: a crypto-exchange download page, a crypto-casino review site, a Chinese lottery spam page, a consumer towing publication, and a third party's recovered copy of the old site. Seven show a hosting company's default page, a "coming soon" placeholder or an unclaimed site-builder address. Two were off-topic: a consumer computer-repair shop and a consumer home-inventory app filed as software vendors. One domain now leads to a parent company whose site no longer mentions the product.

Each of these was searched by name before it was removed, and none was removed on a failed connection alone. Where a domain now served someone else, we first took the address off our record, fourteen times in all, so that no reader was sent to a casino site from a business profile.

The 41 left undecided are a reminder of why caution matters. Several have domains that failed all day while their own pages were still in search indexes and their LinkedIn pages still described them. One, bought by another firm, could be read only through search snippets because the owner's site returned 403 to every automated read. In some, an acquisition is stated but nobody says the product ended. One vendor's home page carried injected pharmaceutical spam, while its own blog announced its acquisition. One developer-tools vendor in the first batch had nameservers that did not answer, but its domain was paid up to 2028 and its last release was less than two years old, so we treated it as an outage. It was removed a batch later, only after its archive showed no live site since mid-2025. Two checks, a few hours apart, reached opposite readings. Either could have been wrong on its own.

Checking a vendor yourself: the method

Everything our research used is public, and a buyer can repeat it for any supplier without special tools or access. The steps below are the ones we followed, in order.

1. Resolve the domain. Look the address up with any DNS tool, through two different public resolvers. A domain that does not exist is different from one whose nameservers fail to answer. Then check the registration record (WHOIS or RDAP). A domain renewed years ahead with broken DNS points to an outage. One that expired last month and now belongs to a registrar points the other way.

2. Follow the redirect and read where you land. Load the old address and note the final domain and the page title, not just whether a page appeared. A redirect to a product page on another company's site usually means an acquisition, while a bare login screen tells you nothing about what is sold today. A domain marketplace or a registrar's lander means the business let the name go.

3. Look for the owner's own words. Search the suspected owner's newsroom and the vendor's blog for the old name next to words like acquires, joins, now part of or rebrands. Count only a statement by the vendor or the company that bought it. A competitor's blog saying a rival has shut down, a reseller's note that a product is discontinued, or a directory entry are leads to follow, not evidence. Several of our undecided listings rest on exactly those kinds of claims.

4. Recognise the signs of a dead or reassigned domain. Watch for a "this domain may be for sale" banner or a price, a hosting company's default page saying there is no website at the address, a "coming soon" page on a firm that has been trading for years, or an unclaimed site-builder page. Watch too for content in another language or trade entirely: casino reviews, lottery pages, crypto downloads. On a live site, look at the copyright year and the newest item on the news page. One vendor we removed had nothing newer than 2009.

5. Find the notice page, and keep a copy. Sunset notices sit in odd places: a dedicated subdomain, a single blog post, a help-centre article or a code repository's readme. If the domain has lapsed, a web archive often holds the notice. Save it with the date you read it.

6. Use secondary signs, as secondary signs. A LinkedIn company page shows recent posts, staff numbers and the website the firm now gives. A code repository shows the date of the last release. A company registry, such as Companies House in the UK or a state register in the US, shows whether the company is active, in administration or dissolved. These support a reading but do not settle it. A LinkedIn page can outlive its company by years, and a registry record can lag behind events or refer to a different entity with the same name.

7. Do not treat a failed fetch as a closure. Many live vendors block automated requests with a 403 or a bot challenge, build their pages in the browser so that a simple fetch sees nothing, or have a bad day at their host. Try again from a normal browser, on another network and on another day, and check whether search engines have indexed any recent pages. In our batches, several live vendors refused automated reads and were written up from their pages as indexed, and more than one domain that failed all day belonged to a business that was plainly still operating.

8. If the vendor has been acquired, ask five questions. First, the roadmap: will the product be kept, folded into the owner's platform or replaced, and on what timetable? Second, support: what is the end date for fixes, and security fixes in particular, and does "no immediate change" have an end? Third, the contract: who is now the counterparty, does your agreement allow it to be assigned, and do the terms, the data processing agreement or the list of subprocessors change? One vendor in our set now names its parent company as the provider in its own data protection addendum, a change a customer would find only by reading it. Fourth, data export: which formats are offered, until when, and what happens to the data afterwards? Livestream's customers had one date for broadcasting to end and a later one for their videos to go. Fifth, access: will existing logins keep working? After Chalk's address began forwarding to PowerSchool, its sign-in stayed open for existing users of its lesson planner. That is the kind of detail to confirm before relying on it.

9. Write down what you found, with the date and the source. A supplier record that says "checked on this date, owned by this company according to this page" can be rechecked in minutes next year. One that says only "active" cannot. Recheck at every renewal, and whenever an invoice arrives from a company whose name you do not recognise.

What this count does not show

These are 653 vendors from one import, worked in queue order over two days, and the runs of categories they fell into shape the result. Categories with a lot of consolidation will push the ownership share up, and categories full of small, long-lived niche vendors will push it down. The proportions describe this set, not software vendors in general.

The ownership count includes only what the pages state. A vendor that belongs to a larger group without saying so appears here among the 442, so the true share of vendors with a new owner is at least 92 in 653 and probably higher. Deal years come only from the pages, and 48 of the 92 give none.

The removals and the undecided listings are not closures. A removed vendor is one for which we could find nothing current in September 2026. Some of those businesses may still trade under another name or from another address we did not find. The 41 undecided listings are exactly that, and several will turn out to be alive.

The rewrites were made in eleven batches to one written brief, each from the business's own pages as read on the day, and each draft was checked for voice, length and unsupported claims. Where a page was unavailable to automated reading, the search copy of the business's own page was used. A few ownership and rename calls rest on the business's own LinkedIn page rather than its website, and we have flagged those for a second review.

Disclosure. TrustList's parent company also makes software, sold as Rutba products. None of the 653 vendors, and none of the product listings in this data, is a Rutba business or product. A search of every entry for the name found nothing.