Companies leave clues about what they're building long before it becomes obvious. Patents are one of the richest public sources of those clues, showing the technical bets, the people behind them, and the problems a company has decided are worth solving. They're written in dense technical language and largely ignored by everyone else.
We want to change that.
Nest filed its first thermostat patents in 2010, before it had shipped a product. Three years later it had more than 200 filings covering occupancy detection, automatic scheduling, and energy optimization in the home. The direction was legible the whole time, years before Google bought the company for $3.2 billion.
Every week thousands of patents go public. Startups protecting new inventions, big companies defending their moats, whole industries showing their hand. All of it is free to access. Reading it takes more hours than anyone has and a high tolerance for dry prose, so the people who keep up tend to be the ones paid to. Hedge funds fold patent data into their models alongside earnings and market fundamentals, and the research says it earns its place. Companies that file patents have beaten the market for decades.
Firms with patents beat the US market in 97% of ten-year periods, 1990-2017 (O'Shaughnessy Asset Management + Quant IP)
Following what's being built next shouldn't need a Bloomberg terminal. It should feel like your favorite weekly read. That's what we're making.
Plenty of tools can summarize a patent. The interesting part is everything around it, the competitors, the capital, the market it lands in, and what it means if the thing works. That's where we spend our time.
A story that shows you how the world is about to change.
The patent decoded to plain English.
Why this patent exists, and why you should care.
The competitive landscape. Who's already in the race.
Who's raising, who's acquiring, and the deals shaping the space.
How big it is, how fast it's growing, and what it opens up.
Legal risk, technical risk, and what it could mean for the world.
Our speculation on where this goes. The part we find most interesting.
One patent a week, decoded into plain English. Free forever.