Loci is a startup seeking to redefine the U.S. patent industry. The firm’s founder and CEO, John Wise, argues the U.S. patent process – cost structure, complexity, application timeline – is broken. Key stakeholders – inventors, legal professionals, investors, established companies, the public – would all benefit enormously if the patent process was open, transparent and designed to make ideas sprout.
InnVenn is the consumer product designed to make Loci’s goals a reality, combined with a unique contextual search platform. For $249 a month, per user with no subscription required, anyone can complete a patent search and critically, access a user community focused on ideation and problem solving. This is fundamentally different from Google’s boolean patent search functionality or the offerings by firms in global growth markets at very low cost.
Loci has built a platform to perform searches based on context, but context that has not yet been previously defined or created. Unlike current semantic or entity search, which builds meaning into established labels or terms via known attributes or qualities, Loci’s contextual search capability is designed to identify and organize concepts, ideas, descriptions, and things and model them at the earliest exploratory stages by an inventor. Or a company searching for a solution. Or anyone interested in a topic searching for answers.
In entity search, for example, an “entity” or name holder called brie exists. Descriptive attributes or qualities are associated with it – such as milk, rind, France, 6 months, smelly, farm, and cheesemonger. Context is a critical element as well. So, if you were driving through the countryside while performing a search for brie, local farms, Yelp reviews, and directions to a nearby farm might be included in the contextual based results. But cheese is a known thing.
What if you were searching for something that was not defined, did not have readily available descriptive attributes, or even exist. Loci is solving this challenge for inventors, firms looking for break through solutions, patent attorneys, and the broader technical community.
The platform attempts to fundamentally reshape the visibility and transparency of very early and early stage search by aggregating and organizing thoughts and ideas and mapping them graphically by terms, keywords, and concepts defined by users themselves. Loci’s CEO defines this as a “budding contextual box” which could be 30 or 50 layers deep.
As an inventor, how valuable would it be knowing the current “state” of ideation around a topic? As an established firm, how valuable would early awareness of solutions to strategic and technical challenges be for itself and its customers? As a patent attorney, how valuable would your relationships, brokering, negotiating and possible solutions be to your clients? For all stakeholders, how valuable would shrinking a window of virtual blindness into almost realtime awareness be in the U.S. and later on a global basis?
Currently, the firm’s backend platform is built. InnVenn beta is running and Loci’s developers are adding functionality. The company has 500 paying users. A number of early adopters are patent attorneys and introductions to their networks will be important for future early stage growth. The firm has an enviable burn rate for the number of employees and cannot run out of funds.
Naturally, there are plenty of risks. Like many startups, Loci has pivoted three times as its platform has developed and its value proposition refined. Larger search firms could respond aggressively as Loci gains traction. The firm could make a big enough execution mistake or grow too quickly to remain viable. The pressure to scale is constant.
However, what is compelling about Loci is their clear understanding of the patent industry and how they are proposing to reshape it into something innovative, healthy, dynamic, open and transparent. No one would describe the present system in this way.
As a platform they can be the industry glue, significantly improve performance of systems in the space, empower a variety of stakeholders, and reduce complexity in meaningful ways. Loci is making clear tradeoffs about what activities they are going engage in and what they are not going to do moving forward. The firm has a clear lens on its competitive advantage because it understands the drivers of profitability in the patent industry and the pain points for stakeholders. As a result, how they organize their activities will differ from rivals.
Finally, Loci seeks to build a community driven by identifying great ideas, innovation, and context with the values of transparency and openness. In time, Loci hopes the community will become global and with it the potential for worldwide crowdsourced R&D, standardized processes and patent licensing, among other benefits. While that reality is some distance in the future, I think it is clear the firm has created a competitive position that is unique, defensible, and sustainable.
Like many of you, I look forward to seeing how Loci grows over time and redefines the patent space. Stay tuned.
Contact Details:
Loci, Inc
Loci.io
invent@loci.io
