The AI-native platform turning the world's patents, science, and market data into answers for R&D and IP teams.
PATSNAP. The green-and-blue connected-dots mark - two nodes fusing into one - stands for its idea of connected innovation. Founded 2007, Singapore.
Patsnap sells a deceptively simple promise: before you spend years and millions building something, find out who got there first. The Singapore-founded company runs an innovation intelligence platform that pulls together patents, scientific literature, legal-status records, and market data - then lets R&D leaders, patent attorneys, and strategists ask it questions in plain language.
The origin is almost mundane. In 2007, founder Jeffrey Tiong was interning at a medical-device startup and could not easily find out who else was working on the same idea. That gap - between the enormous public record of human invention and the near impossibility of searching it usefully - became the business. Patsnap began life as essentially an IP directory and, year by year, added the layers that a directory lacks: analytics, then machine learning, then AI agents.
Today the platform is used by more than 10,000 organizations in over 50 countries. Some are exactly who you'd expect - Siemens, General Electric, Dyson. Others are less obvious for a patent tool: Spotify, PayPal, Heineken, Disney, Tesla. The common thread is that all of them make bets on what to build next, and all of them would rather make those bets with the innovation landscape in front of them than blind.
What Patsnap actually solves is the cost of not knowing. A missed piece of prior art can sink a patent application. An overlooked competitor filing can waste an R&D cycle. A freedom-to-operate question left unanswered can delay - or legally endanger - a product launch. Patsnap's pitch is that these questions, which used to take specialist teams weeks, can be answered in minutes.
An AI-native platform with domain-specific agents for prior art search, freedom-to-operate analysis, patent landscaping, and innovation scouting. Its four-stage pipeline processes over 2 billion data points across 20 domains.
Translates legal claims into technical languageA purpose-built agentic suite for biopharma R&D, combining proprietary datasets with multimodal, LLM-based reasoning for drug discovery, biosequence and chemical-structure search.
Built for drug R&D and biotech IPConnected patent and portfolio analytics for competitive benchmarking, patent landscaping, IP portfolio management, and legal-status tracking across global jurisdictions.
The core intelligence workspaceA technology-scouting workspace that surfaces scientific literature, emerging technologies, and innovation trends for corporate strategy and R&D teams.
Spotting what's nextOpen API access to global patent data, legal status, and innovation datasets - so enterprises can pipe Patsnap's intelligence straight into their own systems.
Data where you need itPatent mapping reports, validity and invalidity searches, IP renewals, and consulting that wrap human expertise around the software.
Expertise on demand"Eureka is built to translate the legal language of IP into the technical language of R&D."
Patent and IP intelligence has long been dominated by incumbents built for law firms and patent professionals. Patsnap's wedge was to speak to a second audience - the R&D engineer and innovation strategist - and to build AI in from the start rather than bolt it on. It competes head-on with much larger Western incumbents, an unusual position for a Singapore-founded enterprise-software company.
| Player | Best known for | Angle |
|---|---|---|
| Patsnap | Connected innovation + Eureka AI agents | AI-native, built for R&D and IP together |
| Clarivate | Derwent Innovation & DWPI abstracts | Curated, human-enhanced patent data |
| Questel | Orbit Intelligence | Deep European & Asian office coverage |
| LexisNexis IP | Search + predictive analytics | Legal-first, litigation heritage |
| Google Patents / The Lens | Free public search | Access over analytics |
Patsnap reports that Eureka users have achieved up to 75% productivity gains in IP and innovation workflows - a claim that captures its core wager: that the bottleneck in innovation is not data, but the time it takes a human to read and reason over it.
Corporate R&D and IP departments, law firms, universities, and government agencies make up Patsnap's base - roughly 10,000 organizations. Publicly cited customers span sectors that rarely share a vendor:
The model is B2B SaaS: annual, seat- and module-based subscriptions sold to R&D and IP teams, with tiered access to data, analytics, and AI agents, plus API feeds and patent-services add-ons. That recurring-revenue engine crossed US$100M in ARR in 2023, with around 20% year-over-year growth.
Capital followed. Patsnap has raised roughly US$352M across six rounds from 19 investors, culminating in a $300M Series E in March 2021 led by SoftBank Vision Fund 2 and Tencent - the round that pushed it past a US$1 billion valuation and into the unicorn club.
Bars scaled to $300M Series E. Backers include SoftBank Vision Fund 2, Tencent, Sequoia China, Shunwei Capital & Summit Partners.
Jeffrey Tiong and Guan Dian launch Patsnap as an accessible IP directory.
Patent analytics and portfolio tools layer onto the database, backed by Sequoia China and Vertex Ventures.
Sequoia China, Shunwei Capital and Summit Partners fund global expansion.
SoftBank Vision Fund 2 and Tencent lead a round valuing Patsnap above US$1 billion.
Patsnap announces surpassing US$100M in annual recurring revenue.
AI-agent products ship for tech R&D and a dedicated biopharma intelligence suite.
Patsnap runs an AI-native innovation intelligence platform that lets R&D and IP teams search and analyze patents, scientific literature, and market data to make faster, better-informed decisions.
It was co-founded in 2007 in Singapore by Jeffrey Tiong (Founder & CEO) and Guan Dian.
Yes. Its 2021 Series E of $300M, led by SoftBank Vision Fund 2 and Tencent, valued the company at over US$1 billion.
Its primary competitors are Clarivate (Derwent Innovation), Questel (Orbit Intelligence), and LexisNexis IP, alongside newer AI tools like Cypris and free options such as Google Patents and The Lens.
Eureka is Patsnap's flagship AI platform that uses large language models and domain-specific agents to automate tasks like prior art search, freedom-to-operate analysis, and patent landscaping - reportedly delivering up to 75% productivity gains.