A local start-up has devised a system that lets people quickly search the database of hundreds of millions of patents granted worldwide.
PatSnap set out to disrupt the existing system that required people to plough through the data using legalese and technical terms as search words and phrases, a tedious and often confusing process.
The firm's online service, PatSnap Global Patent Database, allows searchers to use simple English terms when scouring the database.
PatSnap's search engine was launched in 2012, following a beta service that was introduced in 2010 to test the market. It is now used by about 500 organisations worldwide, including Nasa, Pepsi, IBM, smartphone firm Xiaomi, Singapore's Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*Star) and local tertiary institutions. Around 80 per cent of its customers are from outside Singapore.
The firm, which was founded in 2007, is cash-flow positive and has raised about $6.7 million, including its latest round of capital raising which pulled in $4.5 million earlier this month.
The funding exercise was led by local venture capital firm Vertex Venture Holdings.
PatSnap co-founder Jeffrey Tiong, 30, said the fresh funds will be used for product development and marketing expansion.
Its search engine is the only one around that can represent patent searches visually in three-dimensional topographical maps.
A search can result in up to 50,000 patents being located. These can be "visualised" in a map to represent different clusters of technologies as well as different patent owners.
A smartphone patent search, for example, may come up with patent owners Apple, Google, Samsung, Xiaomi and mobile chip firm Qualcomm. Each can be represented by a diffent colour. The different technologies like microprocessors, imaging and user interface can be clustered together.
"This view allows users to quickly identify the relevant technology clusters without having to read through each patent," said Mr Tiong.
PatSnap processes millions of patents each week from all the different government patent data sources throughout the world. "We then clean up the data. For example, IBM can be registered in the patents as International Business Machines, IBM Pte Ltd or just IBM. So we standardise it all to IBM so that our search engine can look for everything under IBM."
PatSnap is focusing on the patent search market, which was worth about US$833 million in 2010, said Mr Tiong, a Malaysian who is now a Singapore permanent resident. He also wants to expand further to include business users like marketers, corporate development and business development executives and bankers and anyone tinkering with innovation.
"This is a faster growing market estimated to be at least seven to eight times larger than the traditional patent search market used by patent lawyers and patent engineers."
His dream is to make PatSnap like e-commerce giant Amazon.
While Amazon offers a platform for merchants to sell goods online, PatSnap wants to accelerate the rate of innovation and discovery for inventors, firms and research institutes.
"Every country is promoting a knowledge economy. For this to happen, there must be innovation. We want to accelerate innovation by hooking up inventors, investors and organisations together," he said.
"Maybe they can find technologies they can license or firms they can acquire. This accelerates the innovation process. My hope is that SMEs here can also use the service to look for patents they can license so as to grow faster."
Annual subscriptions for PatSnap's service starts from $5,000.
