Essays · Founder think
Why Achiral?
Founder essay on why Achiral is named after unhandedness in chemistry, and why each private memory instance is called Chiro.
Someone once asked the most useful question you can ask a young company:
Why that name?
The short answer is that the word achiral speaks to a neutral beginning, before things have taken a shape or direction. Achiral means unhanded, kind of like a newborn before they learn to favor one hand over the other.
I liked the word because it captured the idea of a beginning before any preference, direction, or habit has taken hold. This was the main idea I wanted for the Emergent Memory System we were building: a system that would start neutral and learn from the team's experiences over time.
Achiral is therefore the starting state of each memory instance we create for our customers. We call that instance Chiro. Read more about Achiral, the company and the research we do on ACT-R-inspired memory systems.