PatSnap, an intellectual property (IP) startup which has its presence in Singapore, London, and China, has announced the launch of its new Research and Development center.
The startup had revealed the plans of rolling out the centre in November last year when it had secured funding from Sequoia. It will be putting in $15.6 million in the project over a period of the next two years. Patsnap has collaborated with Singapore’s Economic Development Board to employ high-skilled talent for the same. With the support of EDB, it intends to be a part of the process of generating technical talent in the island state.
PatSnap offers firms a suite of IP analytical and management to help them make better decisions. It analyzes data available in the public domain. It assembles the chunks of data, curates it and applies AI and machine learning to create one type of report for the users.
It has consolidated to form the biggest IP dataset in the world with over 118 million patents and making data relevant and accessible. This has been done through adding licensing and litigation data, economic data, patent valuation, image and chemical formula search and trademark recognition. The company’s clients include companies, government agencies and academic institutions across 28 countries.
The R&D center will be responsible to augment PatSnap’s online platform by carrying out comprehensive researches on machine learning techniques and technologies such as image recognition and semantic search. PatSnap seems to be receiving demands of building one such dashboard. In an interview to TechInAsia, CEO Jeffrey Tiong stated the data might be available online but to make connections between all those different sets is not ‘straightforward’.
He said advances in machine learning and neural networks facilitates entity recognition, i.e. identifying if multiple different entries of, say, a name refer to the same person or firm. He added,
This capability of connecting the dots between different data sources is what we’d like to build in Singapore.
PatSnap has associated with institutions like National University of Singapore and the Agency for Science, Technology, and Research (A-STAR) for the launch of the R&D center. It is also seeking to collaborate with startups specializing in AI and has already teamed with ViSenze, the image recognition company, to enhance its visual search capabilities.
Under the leadership of PatSnap’s CTO, Markus Haense, the Singapore facility will be seen recruiting a team of about 15 data scientists and software engineers, which will then work and complement a similar center situated in China. PatSnap aims to continue working on its product. Jeffrey says PatSnap is generating revenue in “double-digit millions of dollars” but refrains from revealing the exact figures.
His dream is to ring the bell in NYSE or NASDAQ one day. He says there are several factors involved to make it happen, such as market’s maturity, the success of SaaS business models, and the “abundance” of investors.
