After setting up a business, the difficulty of coming up with a new company name is often underestimated. That’s what myself and my fellow LYTT co-founder discovered when we took on this difficult task late one Friday afternoon in 2019. We knew it was essential to come up with a name that encompassed all facets of our business and what makes our sensor analytics platform stand out – but where to begin?
Should we focus on our industry? Well, despite originally proving its worth in the Oil and Gas sector, the technology we’d created was already showing immense potential to be scaled across other sectors, including Water and Power, as the business grew. So naming the company something sector-specific was out of the question – it would limit our scope to scale.
It was important for us to capture the essence and culture of the business within its name. We wanted to communicate our company’s agile, energetic and entrepreneurial character and to reflect the diversity and the shared passion of our team. It was also clear we had to convey the core mission behind our technology – to generate meaningful insights to help our customers successfully navigate the energy transition.
In the end, we decided to focus on how our technology enhanced the perception of the world around us, with the two most prominent human senses: sight and sound.
To “listen”, and so much more…
LYTT is the Norwegian word meaning “to listen”. It’s pronounced ‘loot’ – but keep your mouth in the shape for saying ‘oo’, and try saying ‘ee’, instead. With Norway hosting the first pilot of our technology, it was important to honor our Norwegian heritage. We also really liked that LYTT was pronounced ‘light’ by our British colleagues which meant that the name was able to capture both aspects of our technology’s key differentiator – being able to harness and interpret data from sensors to enable our customers to “listen” to unique acoustic fingerprints, and shed “light” on operational insights that were previously hidden from view. Essentially making the invisible, visible.
We’ve since come across a third pronunciation – ‘lit’. This is most commonly used by our North American colleagues, and the younger members of the team tell us it means ‘cool’ or ‘awesome’. You learn something new every day, and we learnt that we’d unwittingly created three company names at once!
Listening to our customers and employees, regardless of how they pronounce LYTT, is a big part of our company’s success. It helped us deliver value to customers in those early stages and continues to shape both the solutions we deliver now, and look to build in the future. Ultimately, for these reasons, it doesn’t actually matter to us how you pronounce LYTT. It’s precisely because of the different pronunciations that the name LYTT captures how our people, and our customers, make the company their own – which is exactly the kind of culture we wanted to create.
All grown up
Fast forward to today, and LYTT now encompasses the breadth and depth of industry expertise and knowledge with 35+ people of over 15 nationalities, with global projects set to transform operations across multiple industries, including Carbon Capture and Storage and Water. Yet in spite of this growth, our intentions for the company are still reflected in its name. Nurturing talent to design and execute technology solutions that identify and illuminate operational challenges continues to be at the heart of our culture.
For me, the truly special thing about LYTT is that while diversity has become a defining feature of our company, LYTT remains guided by a strong, unifying purpose – empowering its customers with dynamic operational visibility to address their most complex business challenges.
Join the LYTT team today
LYTT is hiring across many different disciplines. From Full Stack Engineer to Sales Manager and many more, we’re looking for more bright sparks to join and shape our community.
Take a look at our Careers page to find out more about our vacancies. We look forward to meeting you soon!
