The backbone of a modern IP team

Enveda is a clinical-stage biotechnology company in Boulder, Colorado that learns from life's chemistry to make better medicines faster. Its AI-powered platform identifies and characterizes molecules produced by living organisms, most of which have never been studied, and builds them into a searchable library of chemical biodiversity that the company mines for new drugs. Enveda has raised a $150 million Series C, including backing from Sanofi, to take a pipeline of ten development candidates through the clinic; its lead molecule, ENV-294, is in trials for atopic dermatitis and asthma.

Jason Tejani is General Counsel and Corporate Secretary at Enveda, where he has built the IP function since joining in 2022. A chemist before he was a lawyer, he holds degrees in biochemistry, chemistry and law and is pursuing a PhD in bioinformatics. He spent over a decade in private practice as a registered patent attorney advising companies from startups to multinationals, and teaches innovation topics as a visiting lecturer at Harvard Medical School and a visiting professor at Michigan State University College of Law.

Enveda runs on doing more with less, and Jason wanted an IP practice that could move as fast as the rest of the company. Two things stood between him and that. The first was capture: Enveda’s R&D produces inventions across chemistry and biology as well as machine learning, robotics and software, and the IP team had kept full coverage by hand, building a culture where scientists were excited to disclose. That would not survive the company’s growth rate, especially if scientists were to stay focused on their own work.

The second was alignment. Enveda’s legal team ties every decision to corporate strategy, which means knowing in detail how each disclosure and patent maps to the company’s product lines. IP teams have traditionally covered that with paralegals doing data entry. Jason wanted to keep the team lean, creative and focused on strategy instead.

Jason first heard about Tradespace after speaking on a high-growth IP panel moderated by Tradespace’s CEO. Once he had confirmed that the platform precludes public disclosure, is SOC 2 compliant, and covers everything a legacy IP management system does, Enveda ran a pilot. The export from the old system was quick and the import took thirty minutes with Tradespace’s customer success team.

When he logged in he found what he had been picturing: his published IP described in plain language and organized by business category, the day’s tasks and upcoming deadlines in one view. In some cases Tradespace held more granular data on Enveda’s assets than the company did, including the latest patent office correspondence. Enveda moved to a full subscription shortly after the pilot.

Disclosures now come in through Tradespace, which turns long scientific artifacts from researchers into formatted materials the legal team can evaluate, so the team spends its time on deeper assessment: the right follow-up questions, additional use cases and patentability, which Tradespace also assists with. The newest hire on the IP team works from Tradespace as a central command rather than relying on outside counsel and administrative support.