Friday, May 9, 2014

New Tech : Companies With Colorful Names Tend to Go With Blue

New Tech

What can blue do for you? Perhaps a lot–if it’s in your company’s name.

When Blue Apron raised $50 million to deliver do-it-yourself meal kits last week, some questions arose: What are companies’ favorite color? Would Blue Apron’s founders have been able to seal the $50 million deal if the title slide of their presentation had read ‘Brown Apron: Fresh Ingredients, Original Recipes, Delivered Weekly to Your House’?

We didn’t ask their investors (Stripes Group, Bessemer Venture Partners or First Round Capital) if the choice of color was a deciding factor. (It probably wasn’t.)

Still, according to Dow Jones Venture Source, Blue Apron represents a trend: More than 25% of the 956 startups since 1992 that received VC financing and had a color in their name went with blue, by far the most popular selection.

Put another way, companies with colors in their names have raised more than $9 billion from venture capitalists in the past 12 years. The blue-named companies? They raised nearly $2.5 billion of it.

But blue isn’t the whole story. Red placed second in the survey, coming in at just under 15% of the color-conscious companies

Green has lately risen in popularity, along with increased interest in “clean” technology. Think Greenleaf Biofuels and Green Mountain Energy.

Last year, there were 16 companies with ‘green’ in their name that received VC funding, while just three had that color in their name in 1995, and none in the three years prior to that.

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