Patsnap founder and CEO Jeffrey Tiong with SVP (Asia Pacific) Guan Dian
PatSnap, a provider of R&D intelligence and IP intelligence platforms for brands and enterprises, has secured US$300 million in Series E financing round, led by SoftBank Vision Fund 2 and Tencent Investment.
Existing investors Vertex Ventures, CPE Industrial Fund, Sequoia China, and Shun Wei Capital also participated.
This development comes nearly three years after it secured US$38 million in Series D round in June 2018.
The London- and Singapore-based firm plans to use the fresh funds to further advance its innovation intelligence platform, accelerate product development, and acquire additional domain expertise in the industry sectors where its technology is used by research and development (R&D) and intellectual property (IP) teams.
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The funds will also enable the company to expand its sales presence around the world and invest in the growth and professional development of its employees.
PatSnap’s flagship R&D Intelligence and IP Intelligence platforms use machine learning (ML), computer vision, natural language processing (NLP) and other artificial intelligence (AI) technology.
Innovation teams at companies, brands, universities and research institutions use these platforms to get access to market, technology and competitive intelligence as well as patent insights needed to take their products from ideation to commercialisation.
PatSnap’s clients include Dyson, Spotify, Oxford University Innovation and The Dow Chemical Company.
“PatSnap’s mission is to empower innovators to make the world a better place,” said Jeffrey Tiong, founder and CEO of PatSnap. “Our global footprint, leadership and strategic position in the innovation economy have enabled us to attract top investors, customers and talent.”
Companies around the world are under pressure to increase the pace of innovation. And while more money is spent on R&D every year — US$2.4 trillion in 2021, according to R&D World — the returns are dwindling. An article published in Harvard Business Review also noted a 65 per cent drop in R&D productivity.
PatSnap’s AI-powered technology addresses this issue by analysing and connecting the key relationships between millions of unstructured data points across disparate data sources to deliver insights that guide R&D decisions and help accelerate the time it takes to bring new innovations to market.
PatSnap claims it has more than 10,000 customers around the world, supported by more than 700 employees working from the company’s Asian headquarters in Singapore, European headquarters in London, and North American headquarters in Toronto.
Over the past year, PatSnap says it has enabled its customers to significantly accelerate time to insight when dealing with unstructured data by an estimated 12x, leading to an estimated 3x increase in successful product launches.
“We believe in a connected world and are impressed with PatSnap’s AI-centric platform that helps organisations and researchers to connect the dots,” said Levin Yao, Managing Partner of Tencent Investment.
“PatSnap is the clear leader in the connected innovation intelligence category. Its impressive portfolio of customer use cases reinforces its role in enabling companies to significantly improve their ability to identify business opportunities and threats across multiple domains and industries,” Yao added.
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Image Credit: Patsnap
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