A group of Apheros employees strike a variety of poses in the corridor of a building

Julia Carpenter (bottom centre) and Gaëlle Andreatta (bottom, second from right) with their colleagues at Apheros.Credit: Daniel Winkler

The meaning behind our moniker

This article is the second in a six-part series in which the chief executives of science companies describe how they landed on a name for their business that resonates with customers, colleagues and investors.

Julia Carpenter is chief executive of Apheros, a technology company based in Zurich, Switzerland, that produces patented metal foams used in fluid-based cooling systems. She explains that the idea for the firm developed out of her PhD project in materials sciences at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich. Carpenter joined forces with co-founder Gaëlle Andreatta, who has a background in physical chemistry and is now the firm’s chief technology officer.

In the last year of my PhD, I knew I was going to start a company, so I started thinking about a name. I worked on it, old-style, on a sheet of paper for maybe an hour a day for a couple of weeks. It had to be a fast process, because I needed a name to meet deadlines for my first grant applications.

I wanted to achieve three things with the name. It had to be something that is unique and that would pop up in a Google search; something that has a connection to the metal foams; and something a bit nerdy. Also, I wanted a name that you can pronounce.

I’ve always been interested in languages. In secondary school in Switzerland, I studied Greek and Latin, as well as English, French and German, plus one year of Arabic.

In most languages, iron and metal are the same or similar words. So, I started combining and playing with three words: iron, metal and foam.

Classical roots

I went back to my roots in the classics. Aphrós means foam in Greek; Aphrodite, the Greek goddess of love and beauty, is born from sea foam. The only people who can look at the company’s name, Apheros, and know immediately are likely to be Greek scientists.

The ‘e’ that I slipped in there is from ferrum, iron in Latin. So, the name means ‘iron foam’.

It was important to me to keep the ‘ph’ — I love a ph. I was annoyed in 1996 when, in German all the ph’s could be replaced by f’s: so foto, instead of photo.

During this iterative process, I googled ‘Apheros’ to see if it was used by anyone else. In the process, I happened on a start-up agrotechnology company in Switzerland, and then I found one in Germany with almost exactly the same name in the same industry. I did not want that to happen with us.

I did find a wine company with a similar name to Apheros in Portugal, and a Pokémon-like card-based game called Elestrals, featuring a character whose name is also similar. So there wasn’t any direct competition, in that these were not in the same space as ours.

Once I had a couple of options, I threw them out to friends and family, and if they thought something sounded weird or strange, then I went back to my sheet of paper. Interestingly, I can’t remember what the other options were.

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