sounding pharmaceutical

Convexia. Tesora. Monarcha. Ambral. Lexius. Nivara.

None of those are drugs. They are companies Y Combinator funded last year, and if you read that list and felt a faint urge to ask your doctor whether Ambral is right for you, you have just done a fairly accurate piece of brand analysis.

The list comes from the Brand Names Report 2026, a research project by Rob Meyerson of Heirloom and John Elliott of Elliott Verbal, who went through all 500 startups YC funded in 2025 and looked at what they decided to call themselves. It is one of the few public pieces of research on a decision every company makes, most companies make badly, and almost nobody discusses afterward.

Their headline finding is summarised in quite a phrase: "the death of derp." Derp is the cute, mildly clumsy, friendly register Silicon Valley wore for fifteen years, back when it was still selling itself as the scrappy outsider. In the 2024 YC cohort, the animal names were Weevil, Dodo, Corgi, Ducki, Scrapybara. In 2025 they are Bear, Kestrel, Dolphin, Bluejay, Beluga Labs, Moss, Cactus. Even the cute option has armor, because somebody went with Pangolin.

Cute reads as disingenuous once you run the economy rather than disrupt it.

The report tracks the same hardening elsewhere. Alphanumerics have started appearing as company names rather than product names, with o11, Sixtyfour and b12 Labs in the class. The long, literal, faintly Victorian company name is back: The Prompting Company, Autonomous Technologies Group, Axial Composites Industries, Axion Orbital Space. International Business Machines would fit in comfortably. And the coinages, about 15 percent of the cohort, have lost their softness. Fewer names ending in a friendly -y or -i, more ending in -a or in a consonant that feels like a door closing. Metorial. Questom. Arcten. Oxus. Haladir.

Read the full list out loud, and you get the mood of an industry more precisely than any keynote will give you. A name is a mood ring which comes with a legal department attached. It often signals how a business sees itself, which is why names move with confidence rather than strategy. When the money was in looking like an underdog, everyone was a small mammal. Now that these companies operate the plumbing of daily life, a small mammal reads quite different.

The report also runs the numbers from Brand New, the brand identity blog, where readers vote on new names as they launch. In 2025, more than 3,000 votes were cast across 32 names. Real-world names scored an average of 18 percent, calculated as the share of "great" votes minus the share of "bad" ones. Coined names averaged minus 1 percent. Stretch the window to 2019 through 2025, and the ranking holds, with real words at 3 percent, coined names at minus 5, and abbreviations down at minus 30.

The two best-performing names across that entire six-year run both arrived in 2025. One is Bugg, a New Zealand gardening brand. The other is Mud, a UK dog care brand: a bug and some mud. Short, ordinary, and both describing the exact thing a gardener or a dog owner is trying to get rid of.

The two most-liked names in six years of data are Bugg and Mud.

We should be careful with this, and the authors were, too. Brand New voters are designers with professional opinions rather than a representative sample of buyers, and a poll captures a first impression rather than fifteen years of market performance. Treat it as evidence about how a name lands in the first three seconds, which is, for what it is worth, roughly how long most people will ever spend on yours.

The back half of the report gathers the academic work, which is where naming stops being taste and starts being evidence. Possessive names, the ones ending in apostrophes, raise the sense that a brand has authority over what it sells. Geographic names read as more authentic the smaller the geography, so Millbrook Vineyards works, and Millbrook Microchips does not. Misspellings are fine when the misspelling carries meaning and poor when it is arbitrary. And a Journal of Marketing study on nickname branding found that companies adopting the affectionate names customers gave them, the Bloomie’s and the Nordys of the world, saw lower engagement, lower purchase intent, and lower willingness to pay. The mechanism was a drop in perceived brand power.

That last one is worth a little bit more attention to, because a nickname is proof of affection. Using it yourself is asking for the affection out loud, which reads as slightly sad in a person and slightly suspicious in a corporation.

The report also logs the year in reversals, and they are stacking up. The Philadelphia Museum of Art became the Philadelphia Art Museum, with a full identity refresh attached, then changed back roughly 120 days later. Aberdeen, the asset manager that once removed the vowels from its own name, put them back in. Every reversal costs real money twice and sends the market the same message: nobody at the top was certain in the first place.

A name is the one part of an identity you cannot revise in the background.

You can refine a logo over a weekend, and most people will never notice. You can swap a palette, tighten a grid, replace a typeface. A name behaves differently because customers say it, staff answer the phone with it, invoices carry it, and the internet indexed it years ago. It is the only asset in the system that lives in other people’s minds.

Which brings us to the part of the report where the authors argue that naming is one of the last areas of brand work conducted almost entirely behind closed doors. Nobody publishes the process, the shortlists, or the legal carnage, the four hundred candidates killed by a trademark search in a market you have never visited. Advertising has its agency announcements and its case study reels. Naming gets a press release and silence.

The silence is a large part of why the work is so often bad. Clients cannot see what good looks like or what it should cost, so naming becomes a workshop with sticky notes and a founder’s spouse. Namers cannot show their work, so the craft never establishes a public standard. An entire discipline gets priced and judged in the dark.

So, a few questions for your next one. Can a stranger spell it after hearing it once, in the accent of a market you actually sell into?
Does it survive being said by somebody who is annoyed with you, on a phone call, at volume?
Is it a real word doing honest work, or an invented one covering for the fact that nobody in the room agreed on the strategy?
And given that 59 companies in last year’s YC class put "AI" in the name, with that category sitting at a tenth or more of the cohort for four years running, is your name describing what you sell or what your category was excited about in 2023?

The best-scoring name in the data last year belonged to a dog care company, and it was Mud. Somebody in that room had the nerve to propose the plainest word available and the authority to keep it in. That is most of the job.