You may have heard of the speech synthesis company ElevenLabs. Recently a friend mentioned they knew someone who worked at a company called TwelveLabs that does AI for video (it feels like it must have been intended to play on the fact that ElevenLabs does audio, but I don't know for sure). Jokingly, I googled "thirteenlabs" and was surprised to find an AI for 3D scenery project. I googled "fourteenlabs". Another AI startup…?? How far does this go?

Numbers 0-99 annotated with links to companies using it + "labs" as their name.
A link has a background if the company is AI-related.

My loose criteria

• The company must have some online presence (not necessarily a website, but usually one).
• The word "labs" (or somtimes "lab") must either go after or before the number (spelled or numeric). There's plenty of companies named after a number - what I'm after is the weird trend of number + "labs".
• If there were multiple, I picked the one that was most similar to ElevenLabs (and thus more likely to have gotten the name inspiration from there?).
• Every company sort of wants to be an AI company now, so it's hard to definitely say what companies are AI related. I marked it if the domain had a .ai TLD or if all of their main products involved AI in a central capacity.

This really just raised more questions than answers. Why is this such a popular naming scheme? Are people independently arriving at this naming scheme? Why call your AI startup "68labs"? Why are the seventies so much more dense than the rest of the higher numbers? Also, I'm tempted to speculatively buy up domains like "twentyfivelabs" or "thirtytwolabs"…

One fun discovery: among all the incredibly same-y startup websites, there is seventyonelab.com. Alongside the usual "all rights reserved" text, it politely informs you it is

best viewed in Netscape 4/0+ or IE 5.0+

Amazing. It looks like a design/webdev portfolio from the early 2000s and is full of fun little sites. I particularly like the aesthetic of the landing page and the other versions of it in the "little project" section. They sort of remind me of what I recently heard referred to as the "vectorheart" aesthetic (like what you'd see on 2000s IDM album covers!).