how to choose a science-company name that delights customers, colleagues and investors

Alongside the commercial aspects of setting up a company, such as filing patents, attracting investors and recruiting staff, science entrepreneurs face a more creative challenge: what to call their business.

In January, Richard Kuo described how his spin-off from the University of Edinburgh, UK, became Wobble Genomics. The name is a reference to biologist Francis Crick’s hypothesis that, in some RNA molecules, the third base in a nucleotide triplet pairs more flexibly than the other two — in other words, that a ‘wobble’ occurs at this position. Kuo said he also reasoned that something “a little bit silly-sounding would probably stick in people’s heads better”.

Series: The meaning behind our moniker

Reagan Jarvis, chief executive and co-founder of Anocca, an immunotherapy biotechnology company in Södertälje, Sweden, says Kuo’s reasoning was spot on, and could spark a discussion with potential customers, investors or employees. “I think it’s a great name. It’s topical, it’s relevant. I know what a wobble base pair is, and you can have an extended conversation about that.”

Maneesh Jain is a co-founder and chief executive of Mirvie, a pregnancy-health biotech firm in San Francisco, California. A physicist by training, Jain recalls starting ParAllele, his first company, in 2000. Its work involved studying mutations in the human genome. “Each variant is called an allele, and we were doing thousands in parallel, so we thought ParAllele would be a pretty interesting name,” he says.

“Unfortunately, most often, people would call up and say, ‘Oh, hello, is that Paralegal?’ So sometimes, names can be a bit too clever. Literal names sound exciting, but I think sometimes they come with unintended consequences.”