PatSnap provides research and development and patent solutions for customers. It has now confirmed raising $300 million in funding as part of its latest Series E round. The main investors were Tencent Investment and SoftBank Vision Fund 2 according to wiggersventurebeat. The company is based across London, Toronto, and Singapore. It will deploy these funds for backing the development of innovative products, while scaling up its global employee roster simultaneously. It will also scale up its sales department, while investing in the professional development of its employees alongside.
Many businesses are facing the heat to scale up innovation, leading to higher R&D spends per year. This was a whopping $2.4 trillion for 2021 alone, as per reports. However, the returns from R&D are steadily dropping for companies, with articles and reports highlighting a dip of 65% in productivity in the segment. This comes in spite of incentives of $15 billion+ given for innovation by the Canadian and U.S. Governments to private entities. This is also happening despite close to 1/3rd of patents in the U.S. depending on research that is sponsored by the Government.
PatSnap was established in 2007 as an IP (intellectual property) directory by Jeffrey Tiong. It enabled companies to tap data for innovation and R&D. Ever since, it has created more technologies in sub-categories such as NLP (natural language processing), ML (machine learning), and computer vision. It enables the identification and analysis of relationships that exist across innumerable data points (unstructured) throughout diverse sources of IPs. PatSnap has also stated that it will enhance research and development decision-making, while lowering the time required for launching new products in the market. The company’s ML-based engine, for instance, undertakes the analysis of innumerable data-points, derived from global patent data. This also covers M&A (mergers and acquisitions), social, litigation, and other related data.
The company’s co-founder, Ray Chohan, stated that the company’s AI-solutions come with immense capabilities in the life sciences sector. It helps pharmaceutical and biotech entities like biotech consulting firms link unstructured and complicated data to foster better insights into product development and commercialization. For example, he added how the company helps life sciences companies identify new applications for molecules, or even the possibilities of repurposing current drugs for newer objectives. This is only possible via the company’s proprietary deep-learning, NLP and ML stack, according to Chohan.
The company offers the analysis of 200+ sources of data and 500 million+ documents, ensuring a connection between various companies, systems of taxonomy, and documents. On the basis of document and patent, the company uses ML and AI for building various models to generate novel index analyses for each paper/patent. There are 80+ diverse aspects which back up this index. These parameters go hand in hand with indexing and valuation ranking, helping highlight patents with higher values. PatSnap helps link 140 million patents, company data, litigation, and licensing, with literature in the non-patent category. This is done throughout 250 million+ data points and 116 legal jurisdictions into one platform. PatSnap also has 10,000+ clients worldwide, along with 100,000+ users. The company has several big names on its client roster, including Tesla, Spotify, Disney, and PayPal.