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Verio is the name of an American high-tech corporation, currently operating as a division of NTT after its sale to NTT in 2000. The company provides Internet access and is one of the larger companies in the ISP industry. The company is signifigant because it was the first roll up in the Internet Service Provider industry, and it was the largest cash buy-out of a high-tech company by a foreign entity in American history.

Verio is the name of an American high-tech corporation formed in the middle 1990s in Denver, Colorado. The company raised funds with which to purchase regional small "mom and pop" ISPs around the USA and Europe. It was initially funded by the principal founders, private investors, NTT, and institutional investors in a private placement. The concept was to "roll up" small ISPs into one large national ISP and achieve economy of scale with a single internet infrastructure, single branded product line, support center, administration, etc.. this type of regional roll up into a national brand is common in many industries, but was the first of its kind in the newly evolving ISP industry which had arose in the 1990s after the US Government de-regulated the Internet for commercial use.

By the year 2000 Verio had bought close to 50 small ISPs in the USA (mainly) and Europe (secondary) rangeing in price from a million or less to over 100 million or more per ISP. During this time Verio went public on the NASDAQ tradeing under the symbol VRIO. In early 2000 Verio was sold to NTT at a per-share price of over $60 or slightly exceeding 5 billion dollars. Because NTT is a Japanese government owned company foriegners are not allowed to own NTT stock (according to Japanese law) and therefore the buy-out was a %100 cash deal. This was and still remains the largest cash transaction for a high-tech company in history. Congress and the Senate held hearings over the transaction to ensure it did not violate national security concerns because the Verio Internet backbone was at the time one of the top 5 in the world carrying a large amount of potentially sensitive data.

Within months of the announced deal the NASDAQ stock market crashed in the spring of 2000 in the dot-com bubble burst. The share price of Verio went from a high in the 80s just before the announced buy-out to single digits, however the set price of around $60 remained and NTT had completed the transaction by the fall of 2000.

Over the course of the next few years Verio abandoned the lower revenue consumer market and focused primarly on the more lucrative business to business web hosting. Most of the original infrastructure and employees it had purchased were disbanded and consolidated into a few large centralized data centers.

Verio continues to operate as a division of NTT.

ISPs Purchased by Verio

• Clark Internet Services (ClarkNet), Columbia, Maryland
• Monumental Network Services (MNS), Chantilly, Virginia
• Internet Information Services (IIS), Bethesda, Maryland
• NorthWestNet
• many others (please add)