Name review: Five new(ish) tech companies

It’s been a while since I’ve done one of these roundups, hasn’t it? Let’s take a look at some names making headlines in the tech world. In alphabetical order:

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ARTIFACT.

 

Artifact, which opened to the public in late February, calls itself “a personalized news feed powered by artificial intelligence.” I’m guessing that the arti- part of Artifact comes from artificial, and the -fact part from … well, news. The company was created by co-founders of Instagram—not the likeliest talent pool for a news business. In an interview with TechCrunch, Artifact (and Instagram) co-founder Kevin Systrom said he wanted to work on a startup the world needed: “It felt like our consumption of information — both factual, balanced, entertaining, etc. — had an existential crisis.” Also: “Many of the people producing this content are going out of business.” So … opportunity? Or hopeless cause?

Artifact comes from Latin roots that mean “an object formed by human workmanship, as opposed to natural processes”; it was originally spelled artefact (and still is in the UK). In archeology, an artifact is an excavated object that shows signs of human workmanship. In fantasy role-playing games, an artifact is a collectible object that confers an advantage.

I’m troubled by the lazy kerning of the Artifact wordmark, but I expect the design will change as (if) the company grows. I’m also not completely happy about the Artifact name—its construction is clever, but it has connotations of something static and archaic. Something you’d see in a museum case rather than a living, pulsing stream of information.

Good for them for using the dot-news domain extension, though!

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BELIEVER.

 

There’s a terrific, beautifully designed publication called The Believer, but this isn’t it. The new Believer, which is still in stealth mode—and which recently raised $55 million—calls itself a “game studio” and “a new approach to gaming.” “We want to build game experiences that are shared broadly among groups of friends,” one of Believer’s founders told TechCrunch, “and the way to truly deliver that is by having as few barriers to entry, like platform exclusivity, as possible.”

The company’s Latin slogan (see above) is “Credo in Ludos,” which translates to “I [singular] believe in game [singular].” Some versions of the company logo translate the motto to “We [plural] believe in games [plural].”

[UPDATE: See comment from Morgan DeTarr, below, for a better translation.]

I’m not an online gamer, but I get the impression that the gaming community is full of passionate intensity, as Yeats put it, and Believer is a suitably pseudo-religious name for a company in that space. (Sample home-page copy: “We will treat every investment you make in our worlds as sacred. We will work hard to be worthy of every hour, every dollar, every drop of sweat, every smile you crack and tear you shed. We will strive to realize your impossible dreams, and we will measure ourselves by your belief in us.”) My one piece of advice would be to either ditch the Latin or correct it.

Like many video-game companies, Believer uses the dot-gg domain extension, which is the country code for the Bailiwick of Guernsey, which sounds fictional but isn’t. Among gamers, “gg” is an abbreviation for “good game.”

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CANDIDLY.

According to TechCrunch, Candidly “partners with entities, including employers, financial institutions, retirement and wealth management firms, to embed artificial intelligence-driven student debt and savings optimization products into employee benefits engines.” According to Crunchbase, it’s “an AI-driven platform for student debt and savings optimization.” According to the Candidly website, they’re passionate about what they do—of course they are—and one of their values is “desenrascanço”: “a Portuguese word for the art of disentangling one’s self from a problem under unconventional circumstances (sort of like MacGyverism, if you will).” (The company is based in New York.)

According to my unofficial and probably underestimated count, they’re one of 318 companies whose names end in -ly.

It’s unclear to me why the company, which was founded in 2016 as FutureFuel, changed its name to Candidly sometime in the last nine months. Yes, there’s another FutureFuel—a chemical company founded in 2005 and based in Missouri—but the two companies operate in such disparate sectors that it shouldn’t be a conflict. (There’s also another Candidly. It’s a photography business, which is a better fit for the name, and it owns the candidly.com domain. The student-debt Candidly as getcandidly.com.)

“Candid” means “open” or “honest”; its Latin source, candidum, means “white” or “pure.” The Candidly finance company makes a feeble attempt to shoehorn candidly into its mission statement: “Because candidly, college should help propel people forward - not hold them back.”

Candidly, I’m not a fan.

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DROIT.

 

Credit where it’s due: This is a handsome wordmark. Of course, I’d expect nothing less from the venerable design agency Pentagram, which has created visual identities for Saks Fifth Avenue, Citibank, United Airlines, and many other high-profile clients.

Compare to the other names I’m reviewing here, Droit—a “regulatory compliance platform used by major banks”—is an old-timer. The company was founded in 2012 “out of New York,” as the TechCrunch story puts it. (In New York, dammit.) Droit merited that story this week because it recently raised $23 million in Series B funding.

From what I can infer, “Droit” is meant to rhyme with “exploit.” It’s not French dwah as in “Dieu et mon droit” (God and my right, the motto of the British monarch) or “droit du seigneur,” aka ius prima noctis, the supposed “right” of medieval lords to have sex with women of lower rank. There’s no explanation of the name on the website, but I would have guessed it’s a truncation of adroit, which isn’t bad. Then I saw the primary home-page header: “Act Right with Confidence.” Am I alone in wanting to write “AWK” in the margin? Does this sound like normal English?

Droit also evokes “droid,” which may be intentional: The company does, after all, boast of its expertise in “automating intelligent decision-making.”

This Droit, by the way, is Droit.tech. Droit.com redirects to a French business-law firm, Therman Couture Jolicoeur. French droit can mean “law” as well as “right” or “right hand.”

 

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THREECOLTS.

 

This, sadly, is not a distinguished wordmark. (Yes, that’s a numeral 3 with a little horse’s head.)

The name, though, caught my attention right away. And the company—which provides cloud software for third-party sellers on marketplaces like Amazon—must be doing something right: According to a TechCrunch story, it recently raised $90 million in Series A funding.

Threecolts’s founder, the enchantingly named Yoda Yee, used to be an Amazon executive himself; he founded Threecolts in 2021. You’ll be relieved, as I was, to know he has a passion for high standards.

I was unable to find an explanation for the distinctive Threecolts name. Here’s the best I could do: There’s a London street called Three Colts Lane, near Bethnal Green. But Threecolts isn’t located on Three Colts Lane: it’s on Shelton Street, Covent Garden. Does Three Colts Lane have private meaning for Yoda Yee? Does he perhaps own three colts? We may never know.

Nice name, though! And its internet address is straightforward enough: threecolts.com.

Comments

[Steve Hall]

What I picked up from your first paragraph about ARTIFACT was "artificial news." Haven't we had enough of that? (tongue-in-cheek, but still . . .)

[Morgan DeTarr]

"Ludos" is the accusative plural. The use of "in" and the accusative with the verb credere is found only in Church Latin. I think that is what they want, though, because I think they are echoing the Credo of the Latin mass, which begins with the words, "Credo in unum deum" ("I believe in one god").

The Latin expression for "droit de seigneur" is "ius primae noctis" (right of the first night). Note the e at the end of the second word.

[vasiliy]

I marvel at the coincidence that, given the history of the Colt brand, Threecolts' founder "has a passion for high standards." High Standard is a long-defunct American maker of target and sporting pistols.