When Matt Wampler cofounded ClearCOGS in 2021, putting artificial intelligence front and center seemed like an obvious choice.
The Chicago- and Philadelphia-based restaurant-tech startup, then branded as ClearCOGS.ai, was developing machine learning tools to forecast restaurant demand.
“We started the company with the fundamental belief that if a restaurant knew their future, they would make better decisions,” Wampler told Technical.ly.
Within months, ClearCOGS began backing away from the AI-forward branding. This was before ChatGPT was a household term, and Wampler found that restaurant operators were wary of the technology.
“It was still the Terminator back then,” he said.
ClearCOGS moved to clearcogs.com. Then generative AI exploded into public consciousness in late 2022, and the cultural meaning of AI changed almost overnight.
The company began publishing more content about AI, some of which drew tens of thousands of views.
“AI was back in fashion,” Wampler said.
“Brands kind of have to stand a test of time… Will your name hold up?”
Sandy Taccone, Blue Blaze Associates
But ClearCOGS didn’t put AI back in its name, a decision Wampler says he’s glad it made. As large language models became increasingly synonymous with AI, he said an AI-branded ClearCOGS could have been mistaken for a chatbot company.
Founders choosing names today are operating in a market where AI is becoming a normal part of new software products, even as the label carries a broader, more visible backlash around jobs, environmental impact and low-quality content.
The money flowing into the sector hasn’t slowed the branding debate. AI and machine-learning companies accounted for 65.4% of all U.S. venture capital deal value in 2025, according to PitchBook and the National Venture Capital Association. That level of investment has made AI one of tech’s dominant categories, and it’s made it harder for AI-driven companies to stand out.
South Jersey-founded Runpod, now headquartered in San Francisco, made a similar naming choice around the same time as ClearCOGS. Runpod launched in March 2022, just months before ChatGPT’s public release. Its founders’ believed that machine learning would dramatically change software development.
CEO Zhen Lu said they named the company for the product — cloud computing environments, or “pods,” that users could quickly start up and run — rather than putting AI in the name.
His test for founders considering an AI name is straightforward: “Whether it will still describe the company in 10 years.”
When ‘AI’ can say too much — or too little
Meghan Richter, founder and chief strategist at Philadelphia-based MRketable, said she’s seeing technology companies move away from leading with AI in their branding and messaging because the technology itself is becoming less distinctive.
“AI is considered table stakes,” Richter said.
For a company trying to stand out, putting AI front and center may not do the trick. Our data analysis suggests it doesn’t offer an obvious fundraising edge, either.
Technical.ly analyzed 200 U.S.-based Y Combinator companies doing AI-related work, using an August 2025 snapshot of YC company data. The sample included 100 companies with AI visibly in their names and 100 without it, matched by factors including their YC class, industry and company stage and supplemented with PitchBook fundraising data.
PitchBook had fundraising totals for both companies in 79 matched pairs.
Of those pairs, the AI-named startup had raised more in 25, the startup without AI in its name had raised more in 31, and 23 were tied. Median total raised was $500,000 in both broader groups.
The analysis isn’t a census of AI startups, and it can’t show whether a company name caused a particular fundraising outcome. Some PitchBook funding records were also unavailable. But the sample offers little evidence of an obvious fundraising advantage for putting AI in a startup’s name.
And investors aren’t the only audience founders have to consider.
Richter said one recent client uses AI but deliberately avoids emphasizing it because its target customers have already encountered AI-enabled competitors associated with poor customer service, security concerns and inaccurate results.
Companies, she said, are better served by emphasizing the problem they solve and the value they create rather than the technology powering the product.
That doesn’t mean AI has no branding value. Sandy Taccone, cofounder and CEO of Wilmington-based Blue Blaze Associates, said putting it in a company name can immediately signal technical credibility, particularly if artificial intelligence genuinely is central to what the company does.
The problem, Taccone said, is that what AI communicates today may not be what it communicates a few years from now.
“Brands kind of have to stand a test of time,” Taccone said. That’s especially difficult when both the technology and the language surrounding it are changing quickly. “Who knows where this is going to be in another six months or a year, two years out?” she said. “Then will your name hold up?”
AI, she said, can still be emphasized in places that are easier to change than a company name, including marketing campaigns, website content, product messaging or taglines. That lets a startup take advantage of what the term communicates now without necessarily tying its corporate identity to it indefinitely.
“Try not to hamstring yourself with a name that might not grow with you after a couple of years,” Taccone said.
A name that outlives the technology wave
Rick Nucci had already watched a different technology label go from selling point to something businesses simply expected.
Philadelphia-based Guru, which Nucci cofounded in 2013, was using machine-learning models built for specific tasks years before today’s large language models. After generative AI exploded in popularity, the company spent significant time considering whether AI should become more prominent in its brand.
It decided against changing the name.
Guru had already built an association with something its customers cared about: trustworthy company knowledge. Generative AI made that knowledge useful to AI systems as well as employees, Nucci said. But it didn’t fundamentally change what customers relied on Guru to provide.
Nucci had seen a version of that technology cycle before at Boomi, the Philadelphia-area software company he cofounded in 2000, during the rise of cloud computing. Customers might have been interested in cloud technology, but ultimately they wanted to know what it enabled their businesses to do.
“The brand has some connotation or feeling or identity that you are trying to convey,” Nucci said, “and that identity should survive beyond any current technology trend that happens.”
Nucci sees another way for startups to benefit from a technology wave without making it part of the permanent company name. Product and feature names, he said, can be more flexible places to use fast-changing technology terms because they can change more easily as the technology evolves.
As for ClearCOGS and Runpod, the naming decisions they made before ChatGPT have now had a few years to play out.
When Runpod refreshed its branding in 2025, it had expanded beyond renting access to GPUs, the specialized chips commonly used to train and run AI models. By then, the company described itself as a cloud platform for AI developers. Putting AI into the Runpod name still wasn’t part of the discussion.
“By then everyone was bolting AI onto their brand, which was exactly the reason not to,” Lu said.
For ClearCOGS, the name points to what Wampler wants the company to provide: clarity around cost of goods sold, or COGS in restaurant shorthand. AI is one of the tools behind it.
“It’s a tool like any other,” Wampler said.
The goal, he said, is to use it to give restaurant workers more time for human work.
“Lead with the problem you solve and the value you create,” Richter said, “not the technology that powers it.”
This story is made possible thanks to support from Ben Franklin Technology Partners of Southeastern Pennsylvania, a nonprofit that leads the Philadelphia region’s equitable economic growth by nurturing and investing in innovative, early-stage companies, and through purposeful involvement in regional and national initiatives. All stories are independently reported, with no partner review.