SaaS brand naming patterns, 2025-2026.

Verb — the action becomes the brand

Slack, Zoom, Plaid are the canonical examples, and Resend, Inngest, Trigger, Bolt, Ramp are the 2025-2026 continuations. The verb names what the user is doing: resending email, triggering a job, ramping a card spend. The action and the brand merge.

The risk with verbs is the descriptive trap — a verb that exactly describes the category ("Send," "Trigger") is hard to trademark and even harder to defend. The fix is a verb that's adjacent — a synonym, an intensifier, an implication. Resend works because it's the second send, the repair, the retry — adjacent to email but not the act of email itself.

Compound — two words mashed into one

Snowflake, Tinybird, Mintlify, Highnote, Tailscale, Posthog. The compound creates distinctiveness through novelty while keeping the two component words meaningful. Tinybird is a tiny bird; the metaphor maps to a fast, lightweight database. Tailscale combines tail (tracking) and scale; the metaphor maps to network mesh.

Compound names clear trademark more easily than either component word alone because the combination is novel. They tend to score well on the SMILE Imagery axis (two concrete images stack) and to read in two-and-a-half syllables, which fits the cohort.

Minimalism — three letters, one syllable

Cal (Cal.com), Bun (the runtime), Mux, Neon, Brex, Ramp, Bolt, Plain. Short names work in 2025-2026 because the developer-tool cohort lives in terminals, where every keystroke matters, and short brand names feel like commands.

The trade-off is severe: short names are nearly impossible to clear on trademark without aftermarket purchase, and almost always require an aftermarket.com. The founder who picks a three-letter name signs up for $20K-$200K in domain budget and a months-long trademark fight in busy classes. For some businesses (Ramp, Brex) the math has worked. For most it would not.

Found-object — a real word from an unrelated domain

Stripe, Bolt, Loom, Plaid, Loops, Neon, Mercury. A real word from an unrelated domain — magnetic stripes, lightning bolts, weaving looms, plaid fabric, audio loops, neon signs, the planet Mercury — repurposed for a technology product. The repurposing is the creative move; the trademark room comes from the cross-category distance.

Found-object names tend to age well because they carry pre-built imagery and pre-built cultural meaning. The risk is collision in the original domain — if there's already a famous "Bolt" in scooters and a famous "Bolt" in checkout, both can technically coexist (different Nice classes) but the consumer confusion is real.

Mythology — names from old books

Anthropic (Greek, "relating to humans"), Athena, Apollo, Hermes, Persona (Latin, "mask"), Tigris (the ancient river), Falcata (the Iberian sword). Mythology names tap into the Latinate/Greek register that reads grown-up, defensible on trademark (because the original referent is public-domain), and gracefully ambiguous about category — useful for companies that intend to grow into adjacent product lines.

The 2025-2026 AI cohort over-indexes on mythology (Anthropic, Perplexity in spirit, Olympia, Athena, Apollo) because the work the companies are doing has the gravity of a Greek myth — agents, oracles, intelligences. The register fits the work.

Latinate — the workhorse register of 2025-2026

Linear, Vercel, Modal, Convex, Replit, Perplexity, Cline, Plausible. Latinate roots — properties (linear, convex), mathematical operations (modal, plausible), or compressed words (Vercel from Vercelli or "vert-" + "-cel", Replit from "REPL" + "-it"). The register is grown-up, defensible on trademark, and clears foreign-language cultural checks at high rates because Latin roots are familiar across Romance languages.

The Latinate register fits B2B SaaS because the buyer cohort is educated, the category is grown-up, and the names read like terms an engineer would already use. Linear is a property of mathematics; an engineer reading the name has an existing concept to attach it to. See the Arq case study for the full forensic readout — the name scored 94/100 across all five axes.

The minority moves — Gerund, Translation, Misspelling

Gerund. Tinder, Glassdoor — the -ing form that names an activity. Has largely faded in 2025-2026 SaaS; the move reads as consumer-app-2014.

Translation. Asana (Sanskrit, yoga pose), Zara, Brex (the founders are Brazilian — the name is portmanteau of the founders' names and an English root). Translation names work when the cohort recognizes the language register — Asana works on yoga-adjacent knowledge workers; it would not work as a database product.

Misspelling. Lyft, Tumblr, Flickr — the dropped-vowel respelling of a real word. Has largely faded in 2025-2026; the move reads as consumer-app-2010 and creates pronunciation ambiguity that the cohort no longer accepts.