A Chat with Darpan Munjal, Founder and CEO of Atom.com

Tell us about Atom.com

Founded in 2012, Atom.com (formerly Squadhelp) aims to be a full startup ecosystem for ambitious new businesses, offering everything entrepreneurs need to build their brand, starting with a domain name. Atoms are the core building blocks of everything in the universe, and we aim to be the core building blocks of every startup!

We began as a crowdsourced naming platform with a large community of creatives. Today, we are a funded, 3X Inc 5000 company with 50,000+ customers, from early-stage startups across the globe to large corporations, including Nestlé, Philips, Hilton, Pepsi, and AutoNation. We still utilise that creative community, however, and the original spirit of finding the best name and matching domain to launch a brand that will thrive is at the core of everything we do.

How did you come up with the idea for the company?

The idea for Atom.com came about from my struggle to name a new business venture. I couldn’t find any platforms online in 2011 that would help me find a great name.

So, I posted on an entrepreneur forum, telling users that whoever suggested a name I believed in for my business would get a small cash reward. The idea worked! The reward wasn’t huge, but the competition, the group ideation, probably meant more than the money. This helped me see potential in the idea of a naming platform.

When I realised that the scale and frequency of the naming problem was larger than I expected I knew my idea had legs. Other entrepreneurs in my network were facing similar challenges finding unique business names. So, with my tech background, I began to build a simple product – a crowdsourcing platform – that made naming projects fast, easy, and fun. That’s how Atom.com began as a side project. Finally, about seven years ago, I committed to building Atom.com full-time, taking the business to the next level.

How has the company evolved over the last couple of years?

Atom.com has helped over 50k clients, including Dell, Nestle, and Hilton, and last year we raised a strategic investment of $10 million. The biggest evolution, however, came this year when we rebranded the company from Squadhelp to Atom.com.

This was to consolidate the company’s growth by choosing a name and domain that reflected where we’re going, as well as where we’ve been. Becoming Atom.com.com is allowing us to expand our services and features. With this development, we’re on our way to becoming a B2B household name.

What can we hope to see from Atom.com in the future?

We’re in a renewed phase after our rebrand so you can expect to see a lot from us in the future. We just launched AtomConnect. It’s a partnership program with tools to create an ecosystem within the domain industry for everyone to collaborate better. At the same time, we are improving our naming platform to speed up and simplify the process of naming and finding the perfect domain names.

We are also focused on using AI in the naming process to build personas that can analyse domain names at scale and tools that can help entrepreneurs and marketers ascertain their brand alignment. Finally, our new offerings include a perks program, free naming tools, trademark support, data-driven research around branding best practices, and much more.