koality - why the name?

koality.io has been around since the end of 2020, but the name is much older. It started in 2010, when our founder Nils was supposed to set up digital quality management including quality assurance at Gruner+Jahr. And actually, the solution is already hidden there.

After a while, it became established in the team that long words like quality management and quality assurance should be abbreviated. QM and QA were born. QA, because we used the English word "Quality Assurance".

People who work in QA are the QA-ers. We thought that was so close to koala, the animal, in terms of pronunciation that we chose the Australian marsupial as our mascot. Even though others claim to have used the term before, we are sure we invented it.

Now we had arrived at the koala. The company and the product we had then founded in 2018 also had the name based on it. Leankoala. The lean koala was born. It was fitting because, unlike many other monitoring tools, we came across as much more lightweight and could set up a comprehensive setup in minutes.

2020 was then the year of koality.io. We had decided to build an even simpler monitoring tool, based on Leankoala. The name should be similar, so that the kinship to the enterprise system was recognizable. Even though now the name relationship to koala is much clearer and it's easy to see that it's a play on words related to "quality", the term actually comes from over ten years of quality assurance.