TrademarkNow Closes $3.5 million Funding Round Led by Balderton Capital

TrademarkNow is the latest startup to pop up in the Helsinki startup scene. Their trademark checking tool has already cleared more than 5000 unique trademarks which, according to the company, translates into clients saving up to 10,000 working hours, or in other words, $3 million in unnecessary operational costs.

This effectiveness has not gone unnoticed; today TrademarkNow announced the closing of a successful $3,5 million funding round led by European VC Balderton Capital.

“The trademark industry has been ripe for reinvention for many years, having failed to keep up with the technological change and innovation that we are seeing across the rest of the enterprise software market. TrademarkNow are hitting some impressive customer acquisition and registry coverage targets, despite being only one year old, because they have developed a solution that responds exactly to the demands of the industry to which it caters”, commented Daniel Waterhouse, the man who led the investment at Balderton Capital.

TrademarkNow is led by former trademark lawyer Mikael Kolehmainen and his team of trademark law and linguistics experts. Trademarks are a market valued at an estimated $3 billion, where more than $1.5bn is wasted by companies on trademark searching every year, according to the data disclosed by TrademarkNow.

Traditionally, trademark searches have involved a multi-stage series of manual checks and risk assessments that can take several days to complete and need to be carried out by qualified legal professionals and paralegals. TrademarkNow’s new technology significantly improves the speed at which this process is completed and requires no legal expertise to execute, saving time and therefore money  for companies who are the starting point of their branding.

Unlike the usual pay-per-search pricing structures, TrademarkNow charges its clients an annual fee for unlimited searches a system that is considerably more cost effective.

The new investment round will be used to build the team as well as to strengthen the company’s presence globally with an emphasis on building registry coverage. Currently, TrademarkNow searches 16 trademark registries across the world including the US, the European Union and most northern and western European countries.

By the end of 2014, TrademarkNow will cover the registries in all European Union member states as well as up to 10 further major territories.