Spintop Ventures invests in disruptive Finnish patent search software company aiming to bring patent search AI to level of human understanding. The investment is well aligned with Spintop’s extensive depth in machine learning, patents and SaaS software sales execution.
IPRally, the AI-based patent analytics and search engine software, today announces a Seed investment totalling €2m. The round is co-led by Join Capital and Spintop Ventures, with participation from previous investor Icebreaker.vc. IPRally will use the funds to accelerate the company’s rapid expansion and product development toward an AI with human level understanding of patent literature.
IPRally is a software company from Helsinki, Finland, that 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 though 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.
Sakari Arvela, an experienced patent attorney himself, co-founded IPRally in 2018, along with Juho Kallio and Juuso Piskonen. In the past two years, IPRally has built strong momentum in a short period of time, quadrupling the revenue in 2020 despite COVID pandemic and expanding to a team of 12. The company serves industries ranging from semiconductor, automotive and heavy manufacturing through to software, healthcare and forest industry, as well as patent law firms and intellectual property offices. Among its customers are leading enterprises, including blue chip companies such as ABB, Philips, Spotify, Saint-Gobain, KONE and Fresenius Medical Care.The company is well-positioned to conquer the multi-billion global patent search & analytics market.
In the next 18 months, IPRally will use this investment to support product development and Artificial Intelligence capabilities, especially around its patent pending core graph technology. The funding will also boost hiring in order to keep up with the rapid increase in customer backlog from Europe and North America.
Sakari Arvela, CEO and co-founder of IPRally commented: “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.” He also welcomes the new investors onboard with excitement: “Join and Spintop share our vision of technology transforming this rather traditional business and have excellent experience on SaaS companies as well as understanding of the importance of IPRs.”
Jan Borgstädt, Partner at Join Capital said: “Intellectual Property is the backbone of every innovative company. Therefore we are delighted to support Sakari and his team’s very clear and ambitious vision to reinvent the paradigm of examining the patentability of new inventions. We actually had the opportunity to introduce the team to more than 15 global industry players from our network, with great success! This convinced us that IPRally’s passionate team and novel AI were ideally positioned to drive tomorrow’s patent searching revolution.”
Sami Niemi, Partner at Spintop Ventures said: ”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. It provides state of the art results, allowing the patent industry to work much more efficiently, as validated by patent intensive organizations and national patent offices already using IPRally.”
About IPRally
IPRally is a startup founded in 2018 that provides explainable AI for patentability examinations and patent invalidation searches, via an intuitive web search platform. The service is suitable for technology corporations and research organizations, patent law firms and public patent offices.
Further information at https://www.iprally.com/
About Join Capital
Join Capital is a Berlin-based, early-stage VC firm investing in the European Neue Industry. With a combined experience of more than 50 years among the partners, Join focuses primarily on industrial and enterprise startups that are laying new foundations for our increasingly automated and connected world. Join’s extensive network and expertise make it a unique VC for the European industrial landscape.
Further information at: https://www.join.capital/, Twitter: https://twitter.com/join_capital, LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/join-capital
About Spintop Ventures
Spintop Ventures is a Swedish early-stage Venture Capital company investing in Nordic software enabling technology companies. Spintop, started in 2009, is backed by the European Investment Fund, Saminvest, Sitra and many high-profile tech entrepreneurs and is currently investing from Spintop’s third fund. Spintop has a sustainable ESG investment agenda for its funds and portfolio companies.
Further information at https://spintopventures.com/