Fubra was born back in 2000, after Brendan McLoughlin and Paul Maunders met at college. They originally wanted to start a web design firm, and managed to convince Brendan's dad, Joe, to lend them £10,000 to kickstart the company. They registered the company at the height of the dotcom boom, but quickly found that running a company in the post-boom business environment was much tougher than they had expected. To keep costs low, they worked from Brendan's old bedroom in Joe's attic.

Before Fubra started, Brendan had spotted an opportunity in registering Italian domain names. Unlike their UK equivalent, Italian domains had only just become available to non-Italian citizens, so Brendan had personally registered a few hundred. At the time they cost almost £250 each.

Brendan realised that Fubra could undercut the competition by launching their own Italian domain registration site. A few months later they launched Livetodot.com.

After a sucessful first month Fubra decided it was time to expand. They hired a few more staff, and abandoned the attic for shiny new offices at the Farnborough Innovation Centre in Cody Technology Park, Farnborough.

But Fubra's domain sales started to decline, and with its added overheads the company entered a difficult loss-making period for the next 9 months. Financially tied and unable to work on its own projects, Fubra spent the rest of its first year offering mostly web design services and hosting. During the winter of 2001, when sales were at their lowest, the company was on the verge of bancruptcy. All staff were asked to take an extended Christmas holiday, unpaid.

However, Brendan had been talking to a Taiwanese company, An Chen Computer Company Ltd, about selling its CD burning software online. He finally secured the rights to become the sole online retailer for CD Mate, and on December 12th 2001, CD-Mate.com was launched. Fubra secured promotion deals with some of the largest CD websites of the time, including CD Cover search engine, Mega-search.net. The site was a success, and the new revenue stream saved Fubra from the brink of closure.

To cut costs 2002 began with yet another move, to smaller offices in Alexander House, Aldershot. Fubra focused on marketing and promoting CD Mate, as well as building and promoting web sites for several clients, the largest of which was the hot air balloon company Balloons over Britain.

By the end of the year Fubra had secured another contract to market software online, this time a program by E-Soft called Alcohol 120%. Promoting CD Mate online had given Fubra valuable experience, and using similar methods helped Fubra turn Alcohol 120% into a worldwide success - it got a million trial downloads and was even featured on US TechTV show The Screen Savers as one of Kevin Rose's most popular dark download tips.

The new revenue from Alcohol 120% marked the beginning of a transition for Fubra, which allowed it to stop working for external clients and instead focus on projects it owned and controlled. In 2003 Fubra began building sites in the travel sector, launching online airport parking and car hire websites. But then Brendan spotted a niche in the market - a search engine which would compare prices from a number of car park owners and brokers. In June 2003, they built the first vertical search engine for airport parking, and launched the airport-parking-shop.co.uk.

Fubra went on to use the success of Airport Parking Shop to launch other travel-related websites, but then in 2004, Paul notices an opportunity to develop their portfolio in a completely different sector. He discovered that the Land Registry were making their sold property price data available for bulk licensing, so he and Brendan decided to buy the data and make it available to the British public for free. After several weeks of intense work they launched OurProperty.co.uk on the 14th of January 2005. The site was popular because before OurProperty.co.uk it was not possible to access house price information for free. It grew rapidly gaining over 150,000 users in the first two weeks after its launch, and some brilliant national coverage.

In November 2005, Fubra noticed that the AA were going to stop providing their Petrol Busters service, which told motorists where the cheapest petrol in their area. They decided to buy the petrol price data, and launched PetrolPrices.com - a site that allowed motorists to find the price of fuel at over 10,000 petrol stations across the UK for free. Fubra's experience in online marketing helped propel PetrolPrices.com to the 7th largest UK automotive site on its launch day.

Throughout 2006 and 2007 Fubra worked hard on centralising the systems in place for launching new websites, and on some sophisticated tools to make the websites work more effectively. The Fubra Passport was born in 2007, which allows users to access our biggest sites with one set of login details.