What's In a Name? Tech Companies Share the Meaning Behind their Name banner image

What's In a Name? Tech Companies Share the Meaning Behind their Name

Some company names are obvious, and others not so much. Take a look below to learn the stories and history behind the names of some of the fastest-growing tech companies.


Reggora's name is a combination of the words “real estate” and “agora”. The word “agora” derives from the ancient Greek term ageirein, meaning “to gather together”. The agora was a crucial component of all Greek villages and towns across the Mediterranean. This ties into Reggora's mission of being a centralized resource for the industry.

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Zach and Sam Dunn were comic book fans growing up. Robin was a great sidekick to start with. When thinking about a name, their mom came to mind, whose name is also Robin. That is how Robin's name was born.

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ianacare. IANA = I Am Not Alone. At the core, family caregiving can be a deeply isolating experience. Our platform provides the tools & community for practical and emotional support - so no one does it alone.

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Our first company name was going to be “Treibglas” – it was a book https://www.amazon.de/-/en/dp/3404240294 written in the year that our co-founder, Andre Christ, was born. Jörg Beyer, our other co-founder, had proposed it because it has a free domain and we joked that our software is at the border of reality. Andre and Jorg quickly found out that the name is not international, not attractive enough and also they wanted to have Company Name = Product Name. So we took the name of the product (LeanIX) and renamed the company.

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Everything about our company and products are aimed at being transparent. From open perils coverage, to open access of our team, to how we share our contracts online, we are providing consumers and agents open and transparent insurance.

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Starburst gets its name from the asterisk symbol, or 'star.' The asterisk symbol is the beginning of an analytics query. Unfortunately, Starburst the candy (which we love), had already taken the solo name, so we initially added Data. These days we just go by Starburst :-)

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One of the first projects that Nexthink’s founders worked on together was naming the company. Listing out 10 different names they had brainstormed, all related to artificial intelligence (AI), forwarding thinking and anticipating what can come next. With this list of ideas, the founders then checked all the web domains for the names they had brainstormed and Nexthink.com was the only one available, making the decision of the name very simple.

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The name Motional connects two words: motion and emotional. ‘Motion’ speaks to the literal movement of our vehicles, and references our figurative, but constant forward motion - making driverless technology safer, more reliable, and more accessible. ‘Emotional’ evokes our people-first approach - the focus on safety and reliability that ultimately delivers peace of mind.

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Tufin means cookie in the old Hebrew Language. Our CEO’s wife came up with the name, while our other co-founder’s wife came up with the design. If you pay attention to the graphics you will notice that our “t” and “f” are the same along with our “u” and “n”, which is why we spell tufin with a lowercase t!

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Our CTO & Founder, Thomas Hazel, came up with the name ChaosSearch. "Chaos" refers to the state of your data in the cloud and "Search" because our platform makes your data searchable. No more data chaos with ChaosSearch.


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Constant Contact was originally founded as "Roving Software" in 1995 with its main email marketing product being called "Constant Contact". The name grew to be so popular that in 2004 Roving rebranded itself as Constant Contact to capitalize on that recognition. The Constant Contact name itself comes from the company's mission to provide small businesses with the tools and guidance they need to engage their customers online.

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Our Founder & CEO, Ben Jabbawy, started Privy to help small businesses convert website traffic into paying customers. As he ran successful pilots with a few local businesses, the name "Privy" was born. The idea was that business owners would get Privy to the fact that they could do better marketing without hiring expensive agencies, all on their own. Sure, it's also a name for an outhouse, but we love it anyway.


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At Poppulo, People are at the center of everything we do internally and externally so we built them into our company name:Poppulo means people in Latin. Our people, our values, our culture and our customers make Poppulo a very special place to work. Our product enables customers to unlock the potential of their people through engaging internal communications.

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Mabl's mission is to leverage AI and ML technology so we can serve as a partner for QA teams, software testers, and high-velocity software development teams. As we debated what to call ourselves, we focused on creating something that would be disarming and feel approachable to a wide range of users. "Mabl" was perfect as it's reminiscent of someone's name while also feeling contemporary and appropriate for the enterprise tech industry. It centers technical innovation and user-friendliness, which perfectly summarizes our goals as a company.

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Piaggio Fast Forward builds on the name of our 135-year-old parent company: the Milan-based Piaggio Group. After only five years, to the parent company's century plus of ship, train, aircraft, motor scooter and motorcycle designs, it fast forwarded into the future in the form of gita™: the follow-me mobile carrier that it launched at the end of 2019. In Italian, gita means a short journey and Piaggio Fast Forward represents the Piaggio Group's excursion into the field of robotics.

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Benchling's founders were aspiring life science researchers and noticed that while scientists are tackling some of humanity's most complex problems, they're equipped with outdated software. Our founders felt that scientists working "at the bench" (industry parlance for the workbenches where experiments are conducted) deserved a tool that was as helpful as an assistant. Thus, the concept of the "Benchling" – a friendly creature ("-ling" like "duckling") that helps scientists at the bench – was born.

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Mark (last name of our Founder, Greg Mark) and "forged" for high-strength parts - like metal and carbon fiber. At the time, everyone was "printing" in plastic, and we wanted a name that signified the 20x strength increase in our parts. Forging - as in metal forging - fit perfectly.

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For those of you who have ever played the video game, Super Mario, there is a magic 1up mushroom that gives players an extended life. At 1upHealth we believe that we can extend human lives in the real world, through helping our customers and patients unlock and take control of their healthcare data. We are bringing that magic 1up mushroom from Super Mario to reality!

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When Andrew and his co-founder, Ed, started the company -- they were looking for a short name that could have .com thrown on the end. They were in serious bootstrapping mode and couldn't afford to buy someone's domain.

They then started looking at words in different languages and one of them suggested "clavija" -- a Spanish word that translates to peg -- like what you would use while rock climbing to keep from falling.

They loved this idea -- because they wanted to build a product that was helping users do something really difficult -- like climb a mountain and be something they couldn't live without. But...there were two problems. 1. No one could spell it (so bad for search) and 2. It "sounded scary." So, with a few letters changed, Clavija became Klaviyo.

Klaviyo in general has a great story -- it's best known as an email and SMS marketing platform, but really the idea is that we believe entrepreneurs and businesses should own their own marketing (not be reliant on big marketplaces and ad networks) and the company has raised $350M (valued at $4B).

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Business-critical application performance will always be dependent on the networks that deliver them. We designed a solution that grants IT and network operations teams the network visibility they need to 'clear the path' for app delivery out to end users, wherever they're located, at any time. Simply put, Apps+Networks=AppNeta.

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The first name of the company was Orinoco which is the longest river in central america. We chose this as it relates to another river inspired company Amazon which we admire for their relentless focus on customer experience, speed wins mentality and innovative creative culture. We took this same approach by taking a different approach to an old industry(insurance) and becoming a Pay-vidor which is a mix between a payor and a provider. We later changed our name to Devoted since it is the best adjective to describe why we do what we do which is our "devotion" to creating a health plan that we trust to be good enough for our own families. This is carried forward in everything we do.

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When the Company first launched, it was based in Midtown, New York. Our founders, Alan, Tas, and Chad, traveled daily into the city on New York's Rapid Transit system's "Rapid7" train (you might notice our logo looks a bit like a bullet-train). With much of the planning and development for the Company discussed on that commute, it seemed only right to name the Company Rapid7. Today, the name embodies our commitment to rapidly responding to our customers' needs, their evolving IT environments, and the emerging threats they face, so we can help them keep moving forward. 

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Lawyers talk about the “four corners of an agreement” as the bounds of a written contract. We’re linking those squares of paper together in our AI-powered contract lifecycle management software, which is how we came up with the name LinkSquares. -- Vishal Sunak, CEO and co-founder of LinkSquares  

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We were originally known as DiscoverOrg before we acquired ZoomInfo in 2019. We decided to take the ZoomInfo name since nearly three times more people were familiar with ZoomInfo than DiscoverOrg, according to a survey of hundreds of our customers.

While it’s very rare for an acquiring company to take the name of the acquired company, using the company name with better brand recognition made the most sense as we entered a much larger total addressable market.

As for DiscoverOrg, our Founder and CEO Henry Schuck came up with the name in 2007 after he saw that “discover” was one of the top 10 most powerful words to use in a company name. At the time, we were a leading provider of org charts. Although people messed it up often, calling us discovery.org and discover.org, we felt that the brand equity was strong.

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WorkStep comes from our mission to help both workers and employers figure out what the right next step is, hence "WorkStep."  We do so by bringing more transparency to the job search, hiring, and decision-making process and have continued to grow our offering from when we first launched since the career journey is always evolving and there's always a next step. Our logo has a "step staircase" in place of the "E" because we believe this kind of support helps workers level up and/or advance themselves throughout their careers.

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Reveneer began as ‘Cloud Sales on Rails’ and rebranded in 2016. Our name Reveneer is a blend of ‘revenue engineers’ - delivering revenue and results for customers through our precise, engineered inside sales process.

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