PatSnap, a startup founded by NUS alumni Jeffrey Tiong and Guan Dian, has secured US$300 million in Series E funding, putting its value over US$1 billion and becoming the first NUS-supported unicorn. It provides businesses with market intelligence and patent insights through their global patent analytics database and search and visualisation software tools.
Co-founder Jeffrey Tiong, an NUS Biomedical Engineering alumnus, had the idea for PatSnap while he was on an NUS Overseas College (NOC) internship to Bio Valley (Philadelphia) as a student in 2005. He had been tasked to search for technical information on patents while interning in a medtech company - Â a process he found to be messy and difficult despite his training in biomedical engineering.
The experience gave him the inspiration to build his own patent and technical intelligence search engine.
He co-founded PatSnap after graduating in 2007, with incubation support from NUS Enterprise. Guan Dian, an NUS School of Computing alumnus with NOC experience in Silicon Valley, helped to build the brand's presence in the Chinese market.
Today PatSnap has about 10,000 customers, including names such as Dyson and Spotify, and employs more than 700 employees in Singapore and in regional headquarters in London and Toronto.
The cofounders' backgrounds are also reflected in PatSnap's specialised search solutions for biotech research: using a variety of artificial intelligence techniques to rapidly search patent and non-patent documents for chemical structures, and protein, DNA, and RNA sequences.
Read more about their achievement at NUS News.
See also the Straits Times, Business Times and Nikkei Asia
