Seattle startup TurboPatent has raised $3.25 million to bolster its growing suite of automation tools for patents and intellectual property.
TurboPatent focuses on corporations and law firms, automating tasks like formatting or document preparation, for example, freeing up people to work on more complex issues. The service is designed to cut costs, save time and lead to more accurate patent documentation.
In addition to the $3.25 million round, the company is working on closing another $1.25 million.
Investors in the round include Voyager Capital, IP management software company Anaqua, former president of Paul Allen’s Vulcan Bill Savoy and John Amster and Geof Barker, co-founders of patent risk management company RPX. Savoy and Bob Romeo, CEO of Anaqua, have joined TurboPatent’s board of directors.
Today, TurboPatent employs 20 people out of its office in Seattle’s Pioneer Square neighborhood. The company says aims to have the same impact on the patent industry as CAD (computer-aided drafting) did for engineering, the cloud for IT infrastructure, and robotics for manufacturing.
TurboPatent raised $1.4 million in funding last year and introduced several new products that use artificial intelligence to improve the patent application process. TurboPatent’s latest product is called Invention Hub, a place for companies to track ideas from developers, engineers and others. A beta version of the program is available now. It lets companies see where they are in the patent process and use analytics to figure out how likely an idea is to win a patent.
Formerly known as Patent Navigation, TurboPatent has an experienced team led by co-founders James Billmaier and Charles Mirho. Billmaier was previously CEO of Melodeo, a cloud-based media platform company that sold to HP in 2010. He also teamed up with Paul Allen in 1999 to launch home-entertainment technology company Digeo, which was eventually sold in 2009 to ARRIS Group Inc.
Mirho, meanwhile, is a patent law veteran, having worked as a patent counsel at Intel and later as a managing partner of a patent law firm.
via GeekWire
TurboPatent lands $3.25M to help companies protect their inventions using automation