Ninon Vengeon
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The motifs hiding in AI company names

ONE HUNDRED NAMES, A COLLECTIVE IMAGINATION

The names we chose for ourselves are never random. Tell-tales or signatures ? 
I made a map. One hundred companies and ten clusters later, let's dive into the industry's collective imagination.

Clusters were found with the Louvain method, a community-detection algorithm that groups nodes by maximizing modularity, the density of edges inside a group versus between groups. Here the edges are semantic proximities between company names, so each cluster is a pocket of names that share a metaphor. The bigger the cluster, the more crowded the metaphor. Open the full version →

What the map says

A few patterns jumped out once the dots settled.

The mind cluster is the loudest. DeepMind, Cognition, Cerebras, Inflection, Imbue, Neuralink. Half the field is trying to tell you it thinks. That made sense in 2015. In 2026 it reads like everyone wearing the same t-shirt.

Motion is the second wave. Runway, Cursor, Adept, Cruise, Drift, Glide. These names sell you the feeling of getting somewhere fast. Notice how many of them are tools, not models. When you ship software people use every day, you want a verb.

Light and cosmos are the romantic ones. Luminar, Firefly, Aurora, Luma on one side. Moonshot, Nova, Orbit, Galileo, xAI on the other. Both clusters lean on the same instinct: make the thing sound bigger than a server rack. Cosmos names tend to come from labs that want to be taken seriously by physicists. Light names come from teams selling to creatives.

Nature is where the infra crowd hides. Mistral, Pinecone, Snowflake, Milvus, Fauna, LlamaIndex. If your product is a database or a vector store, the rule seems to be: pick a plant, an animal, or a weather event. It softens what is, frankly, a very dry sale.

The human cluster is the most self-aware. Anthropic, OpenAI, Character, Humane, Figure, 1X. These names are arguments. They are telling you what the company believes about people before you have read a single line of the pitch.

Craft and scale are opposites that look the same from far away. LangChain, Labelbox, Snorkel, BentoML, Lovable, Retool on the craft side. Databricks, SambaNova, Graphcore, Scale, H2O, C3 on the scale side. One group wants to feel like a workshop. The other wants to feel like a factory. Both are selling picks and shovels.

Abstract and sound are the new entrants. Groq, Weaviate, Qdrant, Zilliz are made-up words that score well on domain availability and badly on pronunciation. Suno, Udio, ElevenLabs, Descript are the audio generation wave, and they sound like audio brands should: short, vowel-heavy, easy to say out loud.

Why this matters, a little

Names are the first signal a company sends, and the first way they define themselves. Naming remains an act of creation, the word holds a performative power. 

Does the underlying narrative become unresponsive when a cluster gets crowded, and should you stay from them ? I'd say no. With human impressions, things are not always so simple and you can always take up space that wasn't free before.

Ps : categories are fuzzy on purpose. If you disagree with where I put a company, you are probably right too.