The '____Labs' Naming Craze: One Developer Maps AI Startups by Number

Starting from ElevenLabs (audio synthesis) and TwelveLabs (video AI), a developer went down a rabbit hole testing whether the numeric ‘[number]Labs’ naming pattern extends further. It does — thirteenlabs turned up a 3D-scenery AI project, fourteenlabs another startup, and so on. The author compiled a grid of the numbers 0 through 99, linking each to a real company using that number plus ‘Labs’ as its name and flagging which ones are AI-related.

The piece is more curiosity than analysis, but it surfaces a genuine question about tech branding: why so many founders independently converge on the same interchangeable, numeric naming scheme, and why certain ranges (the seventies, oddly) are far denser with companies than others. The author half-jokes about speculatively buying up unclaimed domains like twentyfivelabs or thirtytwolabs before the trend fills them in.

The standout find is seventyonelab.com, which breaks the mold of the uniformly slick startup landing pages. It’s a retro early-2000s web portfolio — complete with a ‘best viewed in Netscape 4.0+ or IE 5.0+’ notice and a nostalgic ‘vectorheart’ IDM-album-cover aesthetic — a reminder of how homogenized modern startup web design has become by comparison.