For decades, patents have been a bone of contention in the technology world, seen by some as a way to protect intellectual property, but by critics as a blunt weapon against innovation. In the age of AI, they are once again getting revisited.
New York startup Patlytics has developed an AI-enabled patent analytics platform to help corporations, IP professionals and law firms streamline their patent workflows from discovery, analytics, comparison, and prosecution to litigation.
The Google-backed startup said Monday it had closed $14 million in a Series A round led by Next47 with participation from existing investors, including Google’s Gradient, 8VC, Alumni Ventures, Liquid 2 Ventures and Myriad Venture Partners. Its Series A financing, which brings its total raised to $21 million, came roughly 9 months after its previous seed round in April.
CEO Paul Lee and CTO Arthur Jen co-founded Patlytics in January 2024. Former venture capitalist Lee saw that IP companies were using antiquated techniques when it came to working with patents: discovering, analyzing, and reporting on intellectual property — or building cases for patent-related work such as potential litigation — were all time-consuming, manual efforts. Jen knew the slow workflow first-hand: he was previously responsible for managing the filing and protection of patents at Magic, a crypto wallet company he co-founded.
“Patlytics has an interesting genesis because I don’t have a legal background, and I initially held a lot of misconceptions around legal tech,” Lee said in an exclusive interview with TechCrunch. “Historically, there were many negative connotations and premises around selling technology to lawyers, but AI has truly changed these premises…What we’ve seen in the IP market is that people want better technology; there is a big push for higher-value work using LLMs, and most …