From karma to KARVM: naming a rental platform for India

We used to be called Livana.

Livana was fine. It was warm, it was short, it was easy to say. My co-founder and I picked it in an evening. We built a landing page. We shipped the first version. We told my family. The domain was livana.club because .com and .in were both gone.

That last part turned out to matter.

The problem with names you don't own

Nine months later, when I was thinking about actually launching to real Indian landlords, I did a proper check of livana.in. It was owned by a live co-living platform, in India, with existing customers. livana.com was held by a domain investor asking six figures in USD to sell it.

Worse, someone had registered Livana Technologies Private Limited at the MCA in Bangalore — my city — the year before. Different sector, different founder, but a live filing with the exact company name I was going to launch under.

I was not going to win a trademark opposition against a Bangalore entity that had filed first. And I was not going to build a brand that would forever redirect through .club.

The name I liked was fine. The name I could actually own was not the same name.

The 55-candidate death march

I spent about a week on this. Eight rounds. Fifty-five candidates. Almost all of them died.

The common Sanskrit words for shelter and home — Aashray, Nivasa, Basera, Aavas, Vishwas — were all claimed. Some had housing finance companies on them. Some had real estate startups. Some had listed public companies with billion-dollar market caps. Every recognisable Sanskrit noun for the semantic space we wanted had been colonised by an Indian brand, usually in real estate.

The obscure Sanskrit words — Sthira, Prashray, Kutir, Sakha — had one or two collisions each. Domains were held by squatters. .coms redirected to .orgs that belonged to someone else. Marginal survivors, but not clean.

The Airbnb-shaped English portmanteaus — Homly, Livio, Roost, Perch, Cove, HomeBook, HomeGram — died on the same wall. Every plausible English word had been consumed by a proptech, a fintech, or a lifestyle brand. Roost is a US proptech. Cove is a Bangalore rental and coworking space. Livio is a Pune real-estate developer. Perch is a Toronto proptech. Every one of them was a competitor's registered mark.

The very-Indian imperatives — RentPayKaro, ScoreLo, KirayaBharo — had a pattern behind them (SIP Karo, RechargeKaro, InvestKaro) that produced small, mostly-defunct D2C brands. None of them scaled. And more importantly, none of them matched the register we wanted, which was trust like a bank, not pay your bills like a nudging aunt.

The two names that survived

Two names, out of fifty-five, cleared trademark, .com, and .in.

Vasadha — a portmanteau I built in the Zerodha pattern: vāsa (Sanskrit, dwelling) + -dha (Sanskrit suffix meaning bearer or one who holds). Vasadha reads as the one who holds dwelling. It has the same construction technique that produced Zerodha (zero + rodha, no barriers), which is now a household name in India. Cleanly available across every check.

Grihaya — a Sanskrit samāsa compound: grihā (home) + āya (prosperity, increase). Reads as home-prosperity or home-growing. Warm, dignified, clean.

Both survived. Both were mine — I generated them. Both were fine.

But I didn't love either of them.

What names are actually made of

There's a Landor principle that goes: even the best name doesn't feel right the first time you hear it. Give it five years of brand-building. Trust the process.

That is often true, and I take it seriously. But it doesn't map neatly to founder conviction. If you are going to say a name a hundred times a week for the next ten years — pitching it, spelling it on the phone, writing it into contracts — you need to feel something when you say it. That feeling doesn't come from the etymology sheet. It comes from a decision that this word is yours.

I sat with Vasadha and Grihaya for a couple of days. Neither of them felt like the thing I would defend if a stranger asked me why my company was called that.

Karma

The idea I kept coming back to, through the whole naming exercise, was the same one that had shaped the product. Trust in a rental isn't built by the contract. It's built by everything that happens after.

Every rent payment. Every message. Every repair.

Karma, in Sanskrit, doesn't mean fate. It means action. The word contains, in a very literal way, the exact thesis of my product: the actions build the trust.

I could not use “Karma” — it's a common English word, it's a Netflix show, it's a car insurance company, it's a fintech in the US, it's a hundred small companies. Not ownable.

But I could make a name from karma.

Drop the final “a.” Insert Vfor Visibility — because I wasn't just building a system of actions. I was building a system of visible actions, kept where both landlord and tenant can see them.

Karma → KARVM.

Written as an all-caps mark, like IKEA or BMW or XEROX. Pronounced Kar-vam — the consonant cluster is legitimate in Sanskrit orthography (viraama), which means Sanskrit speakers know exactly how to say it and English speakers learn on second exposure.

The .com and .in were both free. No Bangalore entity. No global collision. No trademark conflict. I bought the domains within the hour.

The backronym that fell out for free

Once I had KARVM, the letters resolved themselves.

Keeping Actions in Renting Visible & Meaningful.

That's not a marketing exercise. It's the actual product thesis, spelled out.

Three things I wish I'd known

First: check domain and TM before you fall in love. Search IP India Wordmark in classes 35, 36, 42. Search MCA for exact and phonetic company names. Search .com and .inand don't accept a .club or a .co as canonical. Do this on day zero, not day two hundred.

Second: the recognisable Sanskrit vocabulary is fully colonised. If the word you want was ever going to be used by a brand, it already has been. Zerodha-pattern portmanteaus — inventing a compound from a real Sanskrit root — are where the whitespace actually lives.

Third: founder conviction is the last filter. After the mechanical checks, you have to want to say the name. If you don't, you'll rebrand within eighteen months and everyone who wrote a contract with your first name will be annoyed with you.

I've said KARVM about four hundred times since I picked it. It still feels like the right one.