We Analyzed 10,000 AI Company Names - Here Are the Naming Patterns That Define the Industry

I went through 10,029 AI company names. Not a sample. All of them. I pulled from Y Combinator portfolios, Crunchbase, Bloomberg, a16z's Top 50, Product Hunt, GitHub awesome lists, healthcare AI directories, fintech trackers, government and defense AI lists - if someone was keeping a list of AI companies, I added it to the pile. 67 sources, 54 industry categories, 20+ countries.

Then I broke every name apart. What words keep showing up? And more importantly, where do they show up? Because "Deep" at the start of DeepMind is doing completely different work than "Labs" at the end of ElevenLabs. Same name, two different words, two different jobs. That distinction matters if you care about naming, branding, or investing in domains - which is exactly why I ran the analysis.

10,029 Companies at a Glance

10,029 unique companies across 54 categories (everything from Healthcare AI to Frontier AI Labs). 1,076 use .ai domains, which is 10.7% of the total. 459 show up in three or more independent sources, meaning multiple people independently decided these companies matter. The average company name is 10.6 characters long. Median is 10. Most common length is 8.

Everyone's Keeping It Short

The name length distribution tells a story before you even look at keywords:

55.7% of AI company names fall between 5 and 10 characters. The sweet spot is 8. And the companies getting the most outside recognition skew even shorter than that. Look at the ones appearing in 3+ independent sources: Cohere is 6 characters. Cursor, 6. Jasper, 6. Pika, 4. Suno, 4. Gong, 4. Replit, 6.

There's a direct line from this to domain investing. These are the name lengths AI founders shop for. Short, pronounceable, easy to type. If you look at the Top 100K Domain Keywords data, words like "nova," "apex," "pulse," and "spark" show up in both places - registered heavily as domains and appearing frequently in AI company names. That overlap is where the demand concentrates.

The 25 Most Common Words in AI Company Names

The prefix and suffix percentages are the real story here. A keyword that's 98% prefix is doing completely different branding work than one that's 98% suffix.

"Labs" runs away with it. 477 appearances - roughly 1 in 20 AI companies. But it's never a prefix (0.0%). It lives in the middle or at the end - ElevenLabs, AI21 Labs, WellSaid Labs. The word doesn't build the brand. It says "we do serious work here."

Compare that to "deep" at 75 appearances and 97.3% prefix. You don't see companies called "AI Deep" or "Intelligence Deep." It's DeepMind, DeepL, DeepSeek, DeepBrain. The word goes first because it IS the brand. It's carrying all of the identity.

This split between leading words and trailing words shows up over and over in the data, and it's the most practical thing in this entire analysis if you're trying to build or buy brand names.

The Prefix-Suffix Split

Every keyword in AI company names tends to settle into a position. Some words lead. Some follow. Some go both ways. And each group tells you something different about how to build names around them.

Words That Lead (70%+ Prefix)

These are the identity words. When a founder picks one of these, it goes at the front of the name almost every time.

"Deep" at 97.3% prefix. "Open" at 98.1%. "Spark" at 95.5%. Nobody puts these at the end. They're short, concrete, pulled from nature, science, and action - and they carry the entire personality of the name. Everything after them is just clarification.

This is why prefix keywords are the most interesting for domain investing. A domain built as DeepAnything.com or SparkAnything.com mirrors the exact construction that funded AI companies gravitate toward. If you want to test combinations, the Name Generator lets you pair these with industry terms and check what's available.

Words That Follow (70%+ Suffix)

These are explanatory words. They tell you what a company does or what type of organization it is.

"Platform" at 98.2% suffix. "Intelligence" at 92.4%. "Productivity" at a clean 100%. You get it. These words don't inspire anybody. They clarify. A domain name built around suffix keywords - AIplatform.com, DataIntelligence.com - is longer and more descriptive. Still worth money, because it matches how companies actually name themselves, but it serves a different buyer than a short punchy prefix domain does.

Words That Go Both Ways

"Data" splits 30% prefix, 34% suffix, 36% middle - genuinely versatile. "Cloud" leans prefix at 48.5% but still has real suffix action. "Bio" is a perfect 42/42 split. These flexible words give you more domain combinations because they work in either direction. DataFlow or BigData. CloudAI or AICloud. Double the positioning options.

1,076 Companies Chose .ai Over .com

10.7% of this dataset uses .ai domains, which is remarkable for a ccTLD belonging to an island with fewer than 16,000 people. Character.ai, Copy.ai, H2O.ai, Otter.ai, People.ai, Beautiful.ai, C3.ai - these are well-funded companies that made a deliberate choice to skip .com.

And they all follow the same naming formula: one common English word, then .ai. Not a made-up word. Not an acronym. A real word that describes the function (Copy, Otter for transcription) or the user (People, Character). That's it.

In the Q1 2026 keyword report, "ai" itself ranks #24 with 625 TLD registrations, and the broader AI keyword cluster is all over the new registration charts. The .ai extension has gone from novelty to norm, and the premium sits on short, real English words. If you can find common English words still available on .ai, you're looking at a buyer profile backed by over a thousand companies in this dataset alone.

Where the Industry Is Piling Up

54 categories in the dataset. Here's where the weight is:

The general categories are big because many companies don't fit neatly into one vertical. But the specific ones - Healthcare (88), Fintech (85), Cybersecurity (70) - those are where companies are building distinct brand identities rather than just calling themselves "an AI company." If you're thinking about domains that combine an AI keyword with a vertical, those three sectors have the most concentrated naming activity happening right now.

Five Naming Formulas That Cover Almost Everything

After going through all 10,000+ names, I kept seeing the same five structures repeated across industries, funding stages, and geographies. Think of these like chord progressions in music - there are infinite variations, but the underlying structures are few.

1. Pick One Word and Own It

Anthropic. Cohere. Perplexity. Jasper. Cursor. Pika. Suno. Midjourney.

The biggest, most well-known AI companies disproportionately choose a single word that says nothing about artificial intelligence. Pinecone is a vector database. Runway makes videos. Jasper writes marketing copy. The name carries a vibe, not a description. Among companies with 5+ source appearances, single-word names beat multi-word names almost 3 to 1. This is the winning formula right now and it's not close.

2. Lead Word + Descriptor

DeepMind. DeepSeek. DataRobot. OpenAI. PathAI.

A strong prefix word anchors the brand, then a second word tells you the space. Founders who choose this pattern consistently reach for words that are short, concrete, and carry forward momentum - "deep" (97.3% prefix), "open" (98.1%), "spark" (95.5%), "quantum" (57.7%).

3. RealWord.ai

Character.ai. Copy.ai. Otter.ai. People.ai. Beautiful.ai.

The .ai extension stops being a domain and starts being the second half of the company name. Every single one of the 9 dot-format names with 5+ sources uses a real, common English word before the dot. This is a very specific naming bet: you're treating the TLD as part of your brand, which means you live and die by that extension's perceived legitimacy. Based on this data, that bet is paying off.

4. [Brand Word] AI

Shield AI. Figure AI. Hawk AI. Luma AI. Mistral AI. Scale AI.

Pick a great word, slap "AI" after it. No mystery about what the company does. The cost is distinctiveness - there are hundreds of "[Word] AI" companies, and after a while they blur together. This is the safe choice, and it shows in the data. It's popular, but the breakout companies tend to use one of the other patterns.

5. Smash Two Words Together

ElevenLabs. Midjourney. Databricks. Moveworks. Soundraw.

ElevenLabs is the single most-sourced company in this entire dataset at 8 independent sources. It's a made-up word that carries the meaning of both parts - a number and "Labs" - without feeling clunky. "Midjourney" tells you about the process. "Soundraw" immediately says audio creation. These names read as one word but carry the weight of two, and they tend to be very sticky. The trick is finding a combination where the two parts flow together naturally. When it works, it really works.

For Domain Investors

If you understand how founders name companies, you can own what they're going to search for next. Here's what this data says about where the money sits:

Prefix keywords are your best targets. Words like "deep," "spark," "open," "quantum," "carbon," and "forge" start AI company names at 70%+ rates. A domain pairing one of those with a relevant second word follows the same construction that funded companies use. Bulk Search lets you check availability across TLDs for these combinations quickly.

Short single-word .coms haven't lost their crown. The most validated AI companies overwhelmingly use short, one-word names. Any single English word that sounds like it could mean speed, intelligence, precision, or scale has a potential buyer in AI.

Single-word .ai domains still have runway. 1,076 companies already chose .ai, and the naming pattern is specific - one real word, then .ai. If common English words are still available there, the buyer profile is established.

Vertical + prefix combos are where the next wave builds. Healthcare, Fintech, and Cybersecurity are forming their own naming identities. Pairing prefix keywords like "deep" or "spark" with terms like "health" or "finance" matches the exact naming formula these sectors are adopting.

If you want to watch these trends in motion, Emerging Keywords shows which terms gained the most new TLD registrations in the past week. Keyword Trends tracks any keyword's registration history over time, so you can tell whether something is accelerating or fading.

All 100 Keywords With Position Data

Below is every keyword that appears as a distinct word in 8 or more AI company names, with full position breakdowns. Have at it.

How This Was Built

10,029 unique company names pulled from 67 data sources. The big ones: Y Combinator portfolios (1,443 AI companies alone), Crunchbase top AI lists, Bloomberg AI coverage, a16z's Top 50, Product Hunt trending AI tools, GitHub awesome-AI lists, and sector-specific directories for healthcare, fintech, cybersecurity, robotics, agriculture, legal, construction, and international markets.

Names were split into individual words at space, dot, hyphen, and camelCase boundaries. Each word was counted as a distinct keyword with no substring matching or stem grouping - "robot" and "robotics" are separate entries because they're separate words. Position analysis tagged each occurrence as prefix (first word), suffix (last word), or middle. Data collected February 2026.

Related Data

This pairs with the quarterly Top 1,000 Domain Keywords report, which ranks keywords by TLD registration volume rather than company name usage. The two overlap in interesting ways - a keyword that shows up in both the AI naming data and the registration data represents demand from two independent angles. The Q2 2026 edition drops in May and will be the first with quarter-over-quarter comparison so you can watch what's accelerating.