We're thrilled to announce our investment in NLPatent, a company revolutionizing patent research.
Patents play a crucial role in fostering innovation, economic growth, and public welfare in society. The patent system incentivizes scientific breakthroughs and technological progress. Ultimately, patented devices and technology have the power to improve our everyday lives. Ironically, while the patented technology is often on the bleeding edge of progress, the patent research process is largely the same as it was decades ago. Companies continue to manage patent portfolios in Excel spreadsheets without a way to gain data insights. Lawyers still spend hours using incredibly tedious, time consuming, and often inaccurate research methods for their clients.
Stephanie, who has been named among the top IP strategists in the world by Intellectual Asset Magazine, experienced the pains of patent research first-hand as an IP attorney at one of Canada’s leading law firms. She partnered with James, combining her domain knowledge with his engineering skills, AI expertise, and experience scaling highly secure software platforms, to start NLPatent. The company is on a mission to bring better, modern technology to IP professionals and the innovation landscape.
NLPatent’s platform is completely revolutionizing the patent research process. Customers simply describe an invention in natural language and, using NLPatent’s proprietary large language model, the system instantly generates results that are conceptually similar. With the click of a button, NLPatent describes exactly why a reference was identified as relevant and provides citations. To go even deeper, the software allows users to highlight specific features, sentences, or limitations within the identified patent document for the AI to focus on, which is then fed back into the machine learning process, and a new list of references is generated. There is no “black box” and the customer has complete control over the direction of the search.
At The LegalTech Fund, we invest in companies transforming the world of law through technology. We agree with Stephanie and James that the pace of innovation on the legal side of patent work should match the progressive nature of the technology being patented. In a space where the status quo tools haven’t changed much since the 1990s, we’re excited to back a team that’s been an early mover with AI.
Please welcome NLPatent to The LegalTech Fund family and let us know if we can connect you to learn more!