Consumer tech founders have cornered the market on strong startup names: you know what you’re getting from Runna and GetYourGuide; while from the pet tech kennel, Woofy, Balloony, Boop and Barkibu are all delightful efforts.
But find yourself starting a B2B software business and you’ll quickly discover that original titles are hard to come by. What do you call some bit of kit that manages customer relationships? Or a tool that helps you stay on top of compliance duties or oversee supply chains? Nobody knows.
Founders will meekly push Salesey, Comply1, SupplyChaine or other unsatisfying titles into the world. What else can they do? And what can we do but shrug and say fair enough, it’s not easy to think of anything better.
But if you’re an AI or defence founder? Now you have something to get your teeth into.
Close to magic
When it comes to AI, it helps that this tech still feels close to magic. DeepMind is a great name to capture what most of us think AI is. China got the memo too with DeepSeek (OpenAI, sorry, is dull).
This is an industry where startups are desperate for attention, where there’s giant sums to be raised right now. Fundraising is an act of persuasion and what better way to convince investors you’ve got the goods than by serving up grand titles like Multiverse Computing or Sky Engine AI.
By far the most popular thing for most AI companies right now to do is to stick “Labs” on the end of their name. We’ve seen Isomorphic Labs, Moments Lab, Literal Labs and Latent Labs all pop up in Europe recently. Somehow, the word promotes curiosity. Germany’s Black Forest Labs, for example, packs a lot of mystery into one name (and the cofounder is apparently suitably elusive).
I’m fairly confident most of these startups don’t resemble real labs. But the word is instructive: there’s a bit of heft being communicated here, whether earned or not. Suddenly we’re thinking of something that’s deeply researched, tested and Frankenstein-ed to life.
One of the most talked about AI startups this year is Stockholm-based Lovable, a high stakes name if ever there was one. What if the company’s crap and people hate you? In the event, the cockiness was justified: people really do love it. Paris-based AI startup Poolside is another fun effort that tells users where they’ll be seated while the AI does the work for them.
Memorable defence titles
Defence names are interesting but for a different reason. This is a highly visual industry with things you can touch: it’s not just lights on a screen but gadgets and machines that can hurt or protect.
There are some vivid efforts. A recent favourite: German drone company Alpine Eagle (Alpine Pigeon wouldn’t have carried the same oomph). Dronemakers, in particular, are being creative. There’s DefendEye in Poland and the baffling Broswarm in Lithuania (these drones fly in packs).
Norway’s esoteric effort BlinkTroll Robotics recently raised investment for a tool that helps soldiers with target practice. What’s behind the odd name? Cofounder Øystein Hatlestad Hovland explains: “‘Blink’ in Norwegian means ‘target’ and ‘troll’ is a very Norwegian thing and easy to remember. Together it sounds funny but hopefully memorable.”
Sweden’s Nordic Shield, which develops bomb shelters, among other things, is straightforward, while UnseenLabs, a French company that monitors ships from space, offers lashings of enigma. What about the evocative Polar Mist Technologies, a Swedish company that builds miniature boats to do surveillance on coastlines. You can’t give this level of sauce to an automated document processing platform.
So my heart goes out to the B2B SaaS crowd, who have a smaller sandbox to play in, names-wise. Eventually of course, we’ll have seen enough new ‘X Labs’ and ‘X Minds’: the tech crowd have a habit of repeating things to death until we all get bored and move on. But it’s fun for now (or at least more fun than thinking too hard about why all these defence companies are suddenly popping up in Europe).
What I’d like to see next is investors hamming it up a little too. Confident bunch that they are, they’ve managed to keep it pretty restrained with names. Though Iron Wolf Capital, the Lithuanian VC firm, clearly doesn’t need any encouragement from me.
Read the orginal article: https://sifted.eu/articles/startup-names-are-getting-sillier-and-i-endorse-it/
