Why We Invested: senseIP

The intellectual property platform for inventors, by inventors

senseIP is a pioneering company specializing in the complete lifecycle management of Intellectual Property (IP), from ideation to utilization. Founded by experts with extensive patent experience, senseIP leverages advanced AI technology to help companies optimize their IP strategies and reduce costs.

Below is a short Q&A with senseIP Co-Founder and CEO Ophir Kretzer-Katzir, where he talks about the experiences that inspired him to found senseIP, how the platform incorporates AI and what he does in his free time. Welcome to the portfolio, senseIP!

1. What is your customer’s biggest pain point, and how do you solve it?

The biggest pain point for many early founders and inventors is that, typically, everything related to intellectual property needs to go through a lawyer, which makes the process time-consuming, expensive and often leaves people unsure of the outcome.

This leads many people to delay starting their IP journey until they have sufficient time and funds, which can be detrimental. If you don’t protect your IP, you can get tangled up in costly and time-consuming legal issues. The solution is to begin the IP process as early as possible.

Imagine having a tool that helps you identify what’s unique about your idea immediately, even before conducting any R&D. The senseIP platform not only enables you to crystallize your unique concepts but also provides the green light to pursue them safely with the freedom to operate. We can secure your IP with patents within minutes, instead of the months or even years it has historically taken to secure patents.

There’s a gap where people hesitate to move forward with their ideas because securing their IP feels overwhelming and expensive. At senseIP, we strive to be your one-stop shop for everything related to IP. We can start with you as an individual and grow with you as your enterprise expands. Managing IP is about more than just protecting your idea or tool; it includes all the management aspects, including annuities that companies often spend on without understanding if the spend matches their business goals.

IP that doesn’t serve a business goal is not worth maintaining. We are the only company dedicated to bringing IP management into a business-centric perspective, moving it away from purely legal concerns. We make sense of IP. Hence the name, senseIP.

2. Tell me more about how senseIP incorporates AI into its solution.

Our core capability centers on two essential functions: evaluating the strength and uniqueness of any given patent and automatically correlating that patent with your business goals. To achieve this, we developed our own large language model (LLM) that enables highly accurate similarity comparisons between parts of patents.

This capability allows us to score patents and correlate them with business objectives. A major aspect of generating new IP is that, unlike patent attorneys, our system searches for similar patents during the patent application process and works to overcome these similarities. This significantly increases the likelihood that your patent will be granted and later withstand litigation.

We’ve also developed our own flavor of extractive question-answering to minimize the time you need to spend on our platform. Our system can nudge you for brief input, handle the bulk of the work and then return to you when necessary. When you start the IP process with us, we extract as much information as possible from your initial input, whether it’s a single sentence or a full research document. Our extractive QA engine seeks answers from the document itself, only interacting with you if there are gaps.

Additionally, we use generative AI for conversations through chat and for drafting parts of the patent application. This is something we trained in-house based on prosecution information from the US Patent Office. The rise of generative AI over the past few years has opened new possibilities. Instead of merely managing existing IP, we realized we could support inventors from the very inception of their ideas.

3. You worked in IP for several years before founding senseIP. What core learnings did you bring into senseIP?

I was the first employee at Varonis Systems, a security software platform, and I built the product team there. Around the second year, investors started asking about protecting our IP. After filing roughly 30 to 40 patents, I realized how complex IP is and that I needed to learn more. Through patent training, I was able to significantly increase my expertise in this area.

Following Varonis’ IPO, I transitioned from leading the product department to creating and heading the strategy and innovation department. One of my first challenges was handling an overwhelming number of administrative tasks. Despite having two patent attorney firms working with us, the workload was immense. I hired someone to help manage these tasks, but we still struggled with the workload. There were just no adequate tools to assist us.

When I moved to the US from Israel, I encountered friends in startups and small companies who sought my advice on their IP. I realized many were in dire situations. For example, one friend’s startup invested $800,000 annually in filing patents, believing they were well-protected. However, upon review, I discovered all their patents were for a product they no longer sold — completely wasted money.

It became clear to me that the way corporate America treats IP is fundamentally flawed. This realization in 2019 led to the creation of senseIP. IP should not be an afterthought. You should know what you’re paying for, understand what you’re getting from it and ensure it makes business sense. If it doesn’t, then throw it out.

4. What do you do for fun when you’re not working? How do you unplug?

I’m a classical violinist. I played for many years as a soloist, concert-master and in chamber music all over Europe. I’ve also been a volunteer firefighter for the past eight years. I was raised with a strong sense of service and a desire to contribute to my community. When my wife and I moved to New Jersey, I decided to train and serve as a volunteer firefighter.