Making the Internet safer one business at a time
Our mission is to provide the tools to help our partners make the internet a safer place.
Our values
Norwegian concept meaning “help or support”. We must work as a community to create the internet we want to have.
Taking a proactive approach to mitigating online harms is an important step in enhancing trust in your products and services.
Strong sense of responsibility to the infrastructure community, prioritizing it over financial gains.
Our story
2014
The story of iQ began a few years before the name came to be when Michael B. Halvorsen and Rolf Larsen launched the .global top-level domain name. The two quickly realize there is a lack of Business Intelligence Tools for their industry and a lack of services in general.
2017
Michael put his skills as a software developer to work to solve the challenges, and the result is a suite of services named RegistryOffice. Together with Steinar Grøtterød, Su Wu, Jeannette Søderland, and Pinky Brand, Michael and Rolf later made this suite of services available to the larger community.
2020
With the sale of the .global top-level domain and the addition of LG Forsberg (of .SE and the founder of Nordic Domain Days), RegistryOffice evolved into IQ Global, which today offers a wide range of Cybersecurity, Reputation Management, and Business Intelligence tools and services to the domain and hosting industry.
2022
With the success of the company's many services, the team needed to expand. Thus, Gianni Ponzi (formerly of PIR) and Kelly Hardy (most recently from Team Internet / CentralNic Registry) were brought on to bolster the company's efforts, followed shortly by Matthew Allen (formerly of Gambling.com) as a Senior Software Engineer.
Today
Today, iQ is not simply a SaaS Service Company or an infrastructure operator; we are also an AI Innovation Hub for the domain name industry and a member of the vast community of users. It is our responsibility to our community of partners and customers, as well as our fellow service providers, to fulfill our mission to keep the internet safe for the users of today and tomorrow.
2017
Year founded
12
Employees
Oslo
Headquartered in Norway
Meet the iQ team
iQ is an agile company providing both AI powered Cyber threat intelligence and Business intelligence tools. Upheld by strong ethical standards, we are committed to our customer's success and to the broader goal of sustaining an open and vibrant Internet.
Su was involved in the application process for multiple new gTLDs right through to the launch and operations of .global.
LG is a veteran in the domain name industry with over 20 years of experience from both the registry and registrar side of the business. Having started out in development and operations at Loopia, he grew into domain product design and relationship management at the Swedish Internet Foundation (.se) before joining iQ as our CTO
Michael has over 20 years of experience in the domain name industry. He is a serial entrepreneur who has co-founded Active 24, the largest Scandinavian Registrar, CloudNames, .GLOBAL registry to name a few.
Domain name and hosting industry expert with over 20 years of experience. It all started with the discovery of his uncle's ZX Spectrum and swiftly grew into a passion for all things Internet. Gianni has experience across all areas of the industry, including multiple years at the Registrar/Hosting, Registry level.
Steinar has a wealth of experience in the Domain Industry and is well respected for his compliance expertise by his peers in the ICANN community.
Rolf is a disruptive innovator by trade and by practice and is a long-standing, recognized pioneer of Internet access, Domain name registrar and Web Hosting services in Europe and Scandinavia.
Pinky has 26 years of domain industry experience — many of those spent at the registry and registrar levels, providing consulting to new gTLD startups and investors interested in the domain space.
Kelly has previously been a consultant for ccTLDs, back end registry operators, data companies and registrars as well as ICANN. She was most recently the Head of Registry Policy for CentralNic.
A talented software engineer, Matthew is originally from Dublin, Ireland and now calls Norway his home. As well as being a movie buff, in his spare time, Matthew enjoys hiking, baking and cooking.