Sakari Arvela is the founder and CEO of IPRally, a company Spintop Ventures invested in early in 2021 and who are now aiming for their next leap as they revolutionize machine understanding of technology on their mission to become category leader in AI based patent intelligence.
IPRally is a startup founded in 2018 that provides explainable AI for patentability examinations and patent invalidation searches, via an intuitive web search platform. This past year includes exciting results. The initial niche software is already used by 100+ of the biggest technology brands in the world (ABB, Siemens, Philips, Nvidia, , Evonik, L’Oreal, ..) and the Nordic patent offices, as the first step in searching for prior art for new incoming patent applications.
– We’re changing how technical information is found and understood. Back in the days you went to a library to look up information, today we all use Google. The patent industry is still very traditional, somehow in the library era. But now you can login to IPRally to find the technical information you need much easier, says Sakari Arvela.
Little had changed in the patent industry since the 19th century. Sakari Arvela founded IPRally after working as a patent attorney for more than ten years – and now he, his co-founder Juho Kallio and their team created an intelligent search engine for patents.
– I realized the work I was doing was following the same pattern over and over again and I thought that this could be something a machine could do, says Sakari Arvela.
Until now, it’s not been possible for machines to understand patents deep enough to allow accurate and automatic classification of patents. IPRally’s AI classifier can be trained to look at patent data according to customers’ existing classification criteria – simply by feeding in the data the customers usually already have at hand. Teams working within a specific technology sector will be fully informed of the focus and innovation activities and trends of their key competitors in real-time including new patents filed within their own domains.
The IPRally team has tripled in the last two years and continues to rapidly grow. Since the IPRally tool is using real deep learning AI and Clojure as a key programming language, some of the best developers have joined the team and unlike many other tech companies IPRally finds great talent. The result is a strong technology team of almost 20 software developers, AI experts and PhDs, providing an exceptionally fast time to market. The commercial team, which is distributed across EU and US, is headed by the former head of sales of two IP SaaS unicorns, Clarivate and Patsnap.
-We’ve grown fast and still haven’t had the chance to have a physical meeting with the whole team. But we maintain an open atmosphere between teams with Slack and regular cross-team sync calls. We also encourage our developers to join in on customer calls, says Sakari Arvela.
Since the seed round in 2021, the team has completed major product projects and the foundation for a solid organization has been put in place.
-We like to solve big problems, and automated patent intelligence is truly one of those. Hearing success stories from the customers is very exciting. When we started four years ago I couldn’t imagine a customer logo wall that we have nowadays. Any tech company who protects their own technology can benefit from IPRally, concludes Sakari Arvela.
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