Solve Intelligence is bringing AI to the $100B+ patent industry

Since starting in Y Combinator 18 months ago, the startup’s revenue has grown 25% month-on-month. Today, Solve Intelligence’s platform is being used by over 200 IP teams across the US, Europe, and Asia. Their customers include top law firms and enterprises, such as DLA Piper, Siemens, and a host of boutiques and solo practitioners.

Solve Intelligence is not only growing fast, it is also profitable. The Company has generated more cash than it has spent since its inception, and, today, Solve Intelligence is announcing a $12M Series A round from 20VC, Microsoft, Thomson Reuters, and Y Combinator.

“We haven’t hired any sales or marketing people up to this point,” said Solve Intelligence co-founder and CEO Chris Parsonson. “All our growth has come organically by building the best product on the market for patent attorneys. We’ve never lost in a head-to-head with a competitor. Now is the right time to scale rapidly.”

The patent market is big. Over $150B in annual revenue is generated globally from licensing patents. $40B+ is spent on patent litigation every year just in the US. Tens of billions are spent on building patent portfolios through prosecution, and many hundreds of billions on R&D, which patents are designed to capture some fraction of the value of.

“Hundreds of billions of dollars are spent on patents every year. But there’s very little software penetration in this space,” said Parsonson. “Most patent work is being done inside Word, email, and PDF preview. There are a lot of inefficient and poor-quality workflows.”

This is changing. “18 months ago, it wasn’t possible to build software for patent workflows. Now it is,” said co-founder and Chief Research Officer, Sanj Ahilan, who met Parsonson when they were both doing AI PhD research at UCL. “Patent attorneys require precise use of language to ensure they capture the full scope of their client’s inventions. We have built evaluations and algorithms to bridge the gap between the output from off-the-shelf AI models such as ChatGPT and professional-grade legal content.”

The biggest blocker to AI adoption in the IP industry is not functionality. Solve’s customers already report 50−80% efficiency and quality gains. Instead, it is concern around security and confidentiality.

“12 months ago, many large enterprises had blanket bans on their outside counsel using AI,” said co-founder and CTO, Angus Parsonson, who is also Chris’s brother. “That is no longer the case.” Solve has now sold its software to some of the largest technology companies in the world, many of which are now encouraging their outside counsel to adopt it too. “We have state-of-the-art industry-leading security. No customer data is being used for training AI models, and neither is it being stored, monitored, or viewed by either us or a third party. It’s all sandboxed; only the user can view and access their own encrypted data.”

Solve’s intellectual property software includes products for AI patent drafting, AI office action response, AI claim charting, and AI invention disclosure generation and enhancement – key functionalities that streamline every phase of the patent drafting, prosecution, and management process.

“The long-term vision of Solve Intelligence is to build the go-to AI-powered platform to assist inventors, in-house teams, and outside counsels across every part of the patent process,” said Chris Parsonson. Microsoft and Thomson Reuters, two of the biggest names in the legal industry, are partnering with Solve in its Series A to execute this vision.

Microsoft is the most trusted brand amongst the legal community, and Solve’s partnership will give the startup access to secure enterprise Azure compute resources and deeper Microsoft Word and Copilot integrations.
Likewise, Thomson Reuters will be able to open up new sales channels for Solve Intelligence as Solve scales into more global and AmLaw firms, with Westlaw and CoCounsel integrations potentially on the horizon to leverage proprietary legal data sets as Solve expands its product offering.

Solve Intelligence co-founders from left to right: Angus Parsonson, Sanj Ahilan, and Chris Parsonson.

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