PatSnap, a Singapore-based innovation intelligence firm, on Wednesday said it received USD 300 million in a Series E funding that was led by the SoftBank Vision Fund 2 and Tencent Investment.
The company provides IP management software for global brands, universities, and research institutes. Clients typically need to look through a lot of information such as patents and legal documents, collecting research and journals from different formats. They might need to hire a consulting firm to make sense of all of the data. PatSnap aggregates this information globally, co-founder Guan Dian told KrASIA.
“We have around 120 million patents or IP data points from 116 countries from the past two centuries. We put this information together and use AI to process this data and find the relationship,” she said. “We then provide companies with an analytics platform that is user-friendly and easy to understand.”
PatSnap counts Dyson, Spotify, Tesla, and Oxford University Innovation as its clients. Most recently, it was involved in accelerating R&D for the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine, but Dian didn’t want to reveal more details.
“Innovation intelligence has a high barrier of entry, it took us two years to build capabilities with our data that gives us a competitive advantage before we expanded globally,” Dian said. Many of SoftBank’s and Tencent’s portfolio companies are clients. SoftBank is also helping PatSnap to expand into Japan.
Vertex Growth, Vertex Ventures Southeast Asia & India, CPE Industrial Fund, Sequoia China, and Shunwei Capital also participated in the last round. The new investment brings the firm’s total funding to USD 351.6 million, according to Crunchbase.