ElevenLabs, TwelveLabs, ThirteenLabs: a catalogue of the number-plus-labs naming trend

The speech-synthesis company ElevenLabs made the number-plus-“labs” formula familiar to anyone following voice technology. A page published at quantumi.sh asks how far that formula actually reaches, and answers with a catalogue: the numbers 0 to 99, each matched to a company that uses it in its name.

How the list began

The author traces the idea to a conversation. A friend mentioned knowing someone who worked at Twelve Labs, a company doing AI for video — a name that appears to play on the audio-focused ElevenLabs, though the author says he does not know that for certain. Searching for “thirteenlabs” returned a project applying AI to 3D scenery, and a search for “fourteenlabs” turned up another startup. The question of how many such companies exist became the page itself.

The rules the author followed

Entries were admitted under loose criteria. The company needed some online presence, though not necessarily a website. The word “labs” — sometimes “lab” — had to sit before or after the number, spelled out or in digits. Where several candidates existed for one number, the author picked the one most similar to ElevenLabs, on the assumption that the naming inspiration ran in that direction. Companies counted as AI-related if their domain used the .ai top-level domain or if AI sat at the centre of their main products; those links carry a highlighted background.

The grid is not full. Several numbers have no company attached, and the author notes that entries around seventy are denser than the rest of the range. The seventies and eighties also include shops and portfolios rather than product companies: 66 is a storefront on a creative marketplace, and 75 is a cannabis brand page.

An unexpected find

Among a field of near-identical startup websites, the author singles out seventyonelab.com, which alongside the usual copyright line tells visitors it is “best viewed in Netscape 4/0+ or IE 5.0+”. The site reads as an early-2000s design and web-development portfolio, filled with small projects — an aesthetic the author links to what is sometimes called “vectorheart”.

The page closes on open questions rather than conclusions: why the naming scheme spread so widely, whether founders arrive at it independently, and why an AI company would call itself 68labs. The author admits to a temptation to buy up unused domains such as twentyfivelabs or thirtytwolabs.