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After a rebound from the previous year, SaaS companies had a successful 2019, paving the way for other IPOs in that category. Vital to VCs’ portfolio, public SaaS companies also have amassed considerable patent portfolios. Searching Crunchbase’s company categories in combination with IPqwery patent data, we are able to take a closer look at overall filing trends. Using IPqwery mapping, all acquisitions and subsidiaries are accounted for to get the full account of all relevant patent statistics.

Given their history, it is no surprise that Citrix, ServiceNow, and Akamai lead in terms of total patents. Both show no signs of slowing down with a combined 42 published patents in 2020 alone. In addition, the volume of patent publications continues to rise since 2015 for most companies on the list, indicating no slowdown in filings. The “Pending to Total Patent” ratio (shown in the last column) can be used to highlight and to gauge the amount of recent innovation being conducted for each company. The higher ratio means more recent patents filed compared to their overall patent holdings.

Using IPqwery on the Crunchbase Marketplace users can dive deeper by viewing the top technologies used by each company, as well as the number of patents pre and post IPO. In addition, lists can be exported to include a company’s full patent portfolio including Title, Abstract, Patent Class, and more. In a similar fashion, trademark filing data can be added to help provide insights into current and future brands in the marketplace and pipeline.

Here’s a quick view of the increase over the past few years in the use of cryptocurrency terms found within the goods and services descriptions of US trademark filings.

Specifically, we searched for the use of terms such as Bitcoin, Blockchain and Cryptocurrency. As can be seen, there has been a significant uptick in filings, especially in the third quarter of 2017. Note that Q4-2017 data is not included.

Some of the top filers include: GENIUSES AT WORK CORPORATION, BLOCKCHAIN GOC, R-STOR INC., VIDROLL LLC, RIVETZ CORP. , CENTRA TECH, INC., and TATS LABS, LLC.

Below are tracks of the frequency of the terms Bitcoin and Blockchain, as from Google Trends.

Here are comparative growth charts of some Fintech Startups, identified by PrivCo as IPO candidates in 2017. IPqwery charted their overall IP filings (patents plus trademarks) and funding rounds.

For our sample, we chose 4 companies that had a similar number of total IP filings, although the relative number of patents vs trademarks are varied within the group. One additional company (boku) was included as an outlier, having many more filings than the others (the vast majority of them being patents).

Not surprisingly, overall there seems to be a positive relationship between funding and filing activity. Generally, the rate of IP filing increases in close proximity to funding rounds, whether for patents or trademarks. Perhaps naturally, securing IP for any startup may bode well for investors.

In a head to head comparison, IPqwery presents the IP holdings of Twitter and Snapchat. True, may not be a comparison of equals, but an interesting one nonetheless.

Note: Aggregating this data is not trivial.  There are many data manipulations required to accurately compile the IP profile for any company. This includes normalizing company names, verifying subsidiary companies and grouping related entities, and even match inventors with their respective companies.

To investigate how this works in more detail, check out the IPqwery Chrome extension for Crunchbase and test it out yourself.

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