When I founded Tradespace in 2019 the vision was simple – to unlock the billions of dollars in intellectual property trapped in companies, universities, and labs. I had spent years leading an IP commercialization practice and had seen firsthand the challenges companies faced to develop, manage, and commercialize their IP. I also saw just how much value could be created from that IP with the right tools and expertise.
The subsequent years have been a whirlwind of excitement, challenges, and growth. Together with my co-founder Kapil we’ve built an amazing team, launched a category-defining product, and unlocked $100M in IP value.
Today, I am thrilled to announce we’ve hit another milestone: Tradespace has raised a $4M seed round led by Eniac Ventures with participation from Amplo VC, Abstract Ventures, Scrum Ventures, and Hike Ventures.
We chose this moment to raise our seed round because we believe AI has brought the IP industry to the brink of a monumental change. How these changes manifest, and whether they metastasize into lasting improvements will be determined by collaborations with IP Technology companies and corporate IP teams. This funding empowers Tradespace to significantly expand our footprint across companies and IP teams. At the same time, we are now able to pursue even deeper IP use-cases applications for our bespoke AI models.
Its easy to raise money in a hot market; however, periods of sustained uncertainty tend to re-focus investors on core business fundamentals and – most importantly – delivering value to customers. Tradespace is uniquely positioned to capitalize on these dynamics. We spent the last four years bootstrapped, building an incredibly lean, focused team that prioritized customer value and experience over everything else. Every feature was the product of hundreds of calls with IP lawyers, inventors, and C-Suite Executives The result – a new kind of IP Management platform that helps IP teams lower IP costs, develop higher quality IP, and commercialize over $1T in trapped IP value.
In doing so, we have enabled our customers to generate over $100M in IP licensing and commercialization revenue, while reducing their IP operations costs by nearly 20%.
We have also emerged as a leader in bringing powerful, LLM-based AI tools to the IP space. When most startups were building simple wrappers for GPT, we saw an opportunity to develop a true application layer for IP that reflected the complexities and nuances IP teams face on a daily basis. This meant finely tuning IP-specific models and developing sophisticated data and orchestration pipelines to solve entrenched challenges like prior art searching, evidence of use analysis, and IP portfolio evaluation.
Today, Tradespace’s mission to unlock IP value is more important than ever. Annual patent filings have tripled in the last ten years, corporate IP spending is at record highs, and technology convergence has put a premium on collaboration and licensing. Moreover, the industry is coming to grips with issues like mental health, burnout, and lack of inventor diversity. Technology won’t solve all of these problems, but platforms like Tradespace can enable IP leaders to spend more time on strategic issues. Specifically, our AI-powered IP Management Platform will reduce the amount of time and money companies spend developing new IP, while improving IP quality and creating new opportunities to turn underutilized IP into revenue.
In moments like this, I find myself reflecting on just how grateful I am to the entire Tradespace family – our employees, partners, investors, and fans, for their continuing support throughout this journey. Also – to our customers who are establishing Tradespace as an industry leader in AI-Powered IP Management, you are our inspiration, and its an honor to enter this next phase with you.
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