Many legal technology startups are simplifying manual workflow for attorneys, and some legal technology companies are providing intellectual property (IP)-focused technology solutions. Among them is a startup called Solving intelligencewhich makes artificial intelligence software specialized for patent attorneys to draft for IP analysis and production.
Solve Intelligence, a Delaware-based legal tech startup, has raised $3 million in funding from investors including Y Combinator, Amino Capital, General Advance, SAV, Translink Capital and Nomad Capital.
Solve’s Head of Research Sanj Ahilan and Solve’s CEO Chris Parsonson both completed PhDs in artificial intelligence at University College London and experienced the time and cost difficulties of obtaining a patent while working at tech companies such as Huawei and Dyson. Chris also heard from his girlfriend, a patent attorney, that there is a lack of software available for patent attorneys beyond Microsoft Word.
Ahilan, Parsonson and Angus Parsonson (Solve Intelligence’s chief technology officer) founded Solve Intelligence in June 2023 and launched its product in July.
“Patents are fundamentally different from other areas of legal technology because they intersect both technology and patent law,” said Chris Parsonson, adding that drafting a patent requires a combination of deep technical input with legal expertise.
“Unlike other legal professionals, many patent attorneys never go to court or review contracts. Instead, they first acquire deep technical expertise in a STEM field through an undergraduate, graduate and often doctoral program,” the CEO continued. “They train for years to pass the bar and then they can become fully qualified patent attorneys. Therefore, the algorithms and artificial intelligence systems required for patent drafting and review differ from those required for equivalent tasks in other areas of legal technology.”
Solve’s product, an in-browser document editor that works like Google Docs but under the hood, is supported by an AI copilot to help lawyers with intellectual property creation. Its AI solution can identify innovation and non-obviousness and help the R&D process. Each granted patent defines what is “novel” and “non-obvious” about a new technology relative to all other technologies in the public domain, Parsonson said.
“Our AI will be able to automatically select the most promising new and non-obvious steps, rank them based on commercial viability and send them to the IP firm working with the technology company to start patent writing.” , Parsonson said, adding that the AI product helps litigate patent portfolio infringement after the patent is filed.
The startup has over 25 IP companies in the US, Europe, Asia and South America using its product. Resolving claims, many of them report performance improvements of 60-90%. The store, which is in its early stages, already generates between about $100,000 and $1 million in recurring revenue by selling its product on a per-seat subscription basis.
The patent analysis market is expected to increase by $5.18 billion in 2032, from $1.3 billion in 2022.
Image Credits: founders of solve_intelligence
Some potential user advocates do not want to use the AI product because of confidentiality concerns in AI creation tools like ChatGPT. Secret The inventions are highly confidential as they have not yet been patented.
“Lawyers who turn us down because of confidentiality concerns generally still don’t understand the difference between training a large language model and making inferences. We believe this will be temporary and become less of a problem over time as people earn [a] greater understanding of artificial intelligence,” Parsonson said. “Everything is encrypted both in transit and at storage and stored on AWS enterprise servers, so our customers get all the state-of-the-art security guarantees that come with AWS enterprise servers. AWS hosting is likely much more secure than many custom hosting alternatives, which is one of the reasons cloud computing has become so popular over the last decade.”
Solve says it doesn’t train on customer data, but uses several “proprietary models, algorithms, sequential LLM calls and augmented generation recovery (RAG) approaches that are specialized for patent drafting and more generally for IP analysis and creation.” The startup obtains patents for many of these methods and works with some of the company’s IP clients to write these patents with the help of its own AI product.
The startup believes that every legal professional will be using AI on a daily basis within the next five years. “The winners will be those who quickly iterate their product into something truly useful for legal professionals. That’s why we’ve built a lean, highly technical team of AI PhDs and expert software developers capable of building the features our users want faster than our competitors,” said the CEO.
Some companies develop software for IP, such as PatSnapCipher and IPRally, which focus on prior art searching and technology classification and grouping for R&D teams. Other legal technology firms, incl Harvey AI, Robin AI and Casetext, create software for legal professionals to draft legal contracts and find and incorporate relevant case law, but they do not focus on patents. What Solve zeroes in on is productive tasks (in patents) such as writing and responding to office actionsParsonson pointed out.
“There are many exciting areas that our product will be able to help across the intellectual property lifecycle. Patent writing is just the beginning,” Parsonson said.
Solve will use the funding to hire staff, meet new customer demand and scale R&D for its next generation of patent drafting capabilities, which it will release over the next two months, including “algorithms and processes for using artificial intelligence to create and analyze technical plans, review patents to increase their quality, adapt AI to the attorney’s unique style, and more.”