Singapore/London-based PatSnap snaps up $300 million in Series-E funding

With offices in Singapore, Suzhou, London, and Toronto, Innovation intelligence firm PatSnap has closed a $300 million Series-E funding round.

The investment round was led by SoftBank Vision Fund 2 and Tencent Investment and saw participation from CPE Industrial Fund and existing investors Sequoia China, Shun Wei Capital, and Vertex Ventures.

The fresh round of investment is slated to be used to accelerate product development and “acquire” expertise in relevant industry sectors, and beef up sales teams around the world.

Primarily used by research and development and intellectual property teams, PatSnap’s platform uses machine learning, computer vision, NLP, and AI technology to provide teams with access to market, technology, and competitive and patent insights. This then translates into idea to commercialisation. Or not, as the case may be.

“We believe AI is radically changing industries, and PatSnap is a technology leader using AI to enable companies to innovate faster using IP data and R&D analytics,” said Eric Chen, managing partner, SoftBank Investment Advisers.

PatSnap currently counts more than 700 employees globally, and over 10,000 clients. Over the course of 2020, the firm assisted customers in accelerating insight when dealing with unstructured data by an (est.) 12x, resulting in a 3x increase in successful product launches.