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.