Finnish startup IPRally, which is building AI-based patent analytics and search engine software, unveiled a 2-million-euro seed investment round, seeking to accelerate the company’s rapid expansion and product development toward an AI with a human-level understanding of patent literature.
The round was co-led by Join Capital and Spintop Ventures, with participation from previous investor Icebreaker.vc.
“I have filed over 20 patents myself, so I have first-hand experience of the inefficiencies in the patent system. The IPRally AI-based approach is the way to go, disrupting an industry that hasn’t changed much for the past 100 years,” said Sami Niemi, partner at Spintop Ventures.
IPRally says it enables Intellectual Property professionals as well as R&D engineers to intuitively build search queries in minutes allowing very precise searches of similar existing patents saving huge amounts of time, and helping to discover patents not possible to find through regular keyword searches. Moreover, IPRally’s unique Graph Neural Network technology allows for machine reasoning of the search results, shifting the paradigm from black-box AI solutions to explainable AI solutions.
Every day, tens of thousands of patent searchers, examiners and attorneys repeat the same pattern: They split inventions into smaller features, search through incredibly lengthy patent publications and aim to compare the contents. Much, if not all, of this, can be automated with sophisticated NLP and Graph Neural Networks. In addition, as the amount of publications is rapidly increasing, it is becoming more and more evident that the traditional Boolean keyword searching – which is dependent on human expertise – cannot meet the quality and time requirements anymore.
IPRally, founded by former patent attorney Sakari Arvela, lists companies like ABB, Philips, Spotify, Saint-Gobain, KONE and Fresenius Medical Care among its clients.
“We are tackling a huge but super interesting problem that affects the everyday lives of patent and R&D professionals. Seeing the speed and quality improvements in our customers’ work – and making patent searching a bit more fun – is very rewarding,” Arvela said in a statement.
