TU Berlin spinout IPlytics has collected several million dollars from investors including High-Tech Gründerfonds to expand into the US, South Korea and Japan.
IPlytics, a Germany-based patent analytics software spinout of Technical University of Berlin (TU Berlin), has obtained several million euros (€1m = $1.13m) in a funding round led by venture capital firm eCapital.
Public-private partnership High-Tech Gründerfonds (HTGF) also participated in the round.
Founded in 2012, IPlytics operates an online market intelligence platform that uses artificial intelligence to analyse and visualise technology trends, market developments and a company’s competitive position.
The platform taps into public patent, standards and company data to determine the statistical value of a business. The technology enables in-depth market analyses, long-term monitoring of a technology or sector, and helps inform R&D investments.
The spinout was co-founded by chief executive Tim Pohlmann, who gained his PhD as a research assistant at Prof Knut Blind’s chair of innovation economics at TU Berlin. Pohlmann collaborated with researchers at Fraunhofer Institute for Open Communication Systems.
The funding will drive the further technology development and will allow the spinout to expand internationally, with a focus on the US, South Korea and Japan. The software is already able to translate Chinese, Korean and Japanese documents into English.
HTGF previously supplied a six-figure sum of seed funding in 2015. The partnership typically provides €500,000 ($567,000 at the time) but did not confirm the size of its investment in IPlytics.
Pohlmann said: “We do not want to replace the patent attorney, but intelligently support the yet often manual analysis. Our customers have domain knowledge and understand the content of a patent, but the number of patent applications has become too large to read everything.
“The learning algorithm of the IPlytics Platform utilises users’ input to evaluate patents, cluster them and link them to other documents such as research articles, technology standards or company profiles.
“We already have customers around the world who use the software.”
