What we analysed
The figures on this site come from Namegrain’s internal analysis documented on 22 September 2026. The headline naming sample contains 2,211 Y Combinator companies across 2005–2026 batches. A separate startups.gallery analysis includes 920 fetched company websites and 1,200 funding events. A YC directory change-log study covers 83 days, from 1 July to 21 September 2026.
The original sources are the Y Combinator company directory and startups.gallery. These links identify the underlying sources; the figures are Namegrain’s analysis, not statistics published or endorsed by those organisations. Our analysis also consulted a Funded Startups Daily sample, which varies by refresh and is weighted toward early-stage companies.
How to read the headline figures
| Figure | What it describes | How to interpret it |
|---|---|---|
| 2,211 | YC company names in the naming dataset, batches 2005–2026. | A selected research sample, not the entire directory or all funded startups. |
| 45% | Share of that YC naming sample given a score of 5 in Namegrain’s phone-test rubric. | An internal classification of spelling clarity. It is not a controlled experiment with listeners. |
| ~1 in 4 | Estimated share of new YC companies renaming in their first year. | A directional extrapolation from 83 days of founder-edited profiles. It is not a measured full-year population rate. |
| 72% | Approximate share of 2023–2026 YC companies in the analysis lacking the plain name.com. | Specific to that cohort. A domain with a prefix counts differently from a plain name.com. |
| 30% / 34% | Plain-.com usage in startups.gallery’s seed (n=222) and Series A (n=323) samples. | A comparison of different groups, not a conversion rate for the same companies over time. |
The rename estimate needs care
The change-log study recorded 131 company renames during its 83-day observation period. Annualising that count gives approximately 576 renames; the internal notes then use the concentration of activity in recent batches to estimate roughly one in four new YC companies renaming in year one.
This method depends on assumptions about the stability of the rate and the cohort denominator. The summary notes do not provide a confidence interval or the full underlying dataset here. Founder-edited profiles can lag real changes and miss others entirely. For those reasons, the site keeps the approximation sign and labels the figure as an estimate.
What is a plain .com?
A plain name.com is the company name on .com without a prefix or suffix such as “get”, “try” or “use”. Being on a .com domain is not the same as using the plain name.com. Domain status is a snapshot at the time of the research and can change.
In the public copy, “lack” or “without” follows the classification in the internal analysis. This is not a current ownership verification for any individual company.
What the research does not establish
These observations do not show that a particular name, extension or rebrand causes a startup to succeed. They describe observed choices and changes in selected samples. They cannot predict the commercial outcome of a new identity.
The samples also carry selection effects. YC is a specific startup population. startups.gallery favours notable companies with press-covered funding. The early-stage feed skews toward AI. Patterns across these sources inform a brief; they do not replace research into your own customers and market.
We use the evidence to ask better questions: does the name travel well, does it fit the company, and do the address and identity work together? The answer for any one business still needs judgement.
Source note
This page summarises the evidence sections of Namegrain — master notes, dated 22 September 2026. The underlying raw datasets are not published here. Figures have not been independently audited or re-collected for this website.