WHY INVENTIPLY
And what two people who spent decades inside the machine decided to do about it.
Between us, we have stood on every side of an intellectual-property fight. One of us is named on more than 262 patents and has watched good inventions get quietly narrowed into worthlessness by the very people paid to protect them. The other has tried cases, helped founders raise more than a billion dollars, and sat across the table from the hired experts whose job was to tell a jury what a patent was worth. We have been the inventor, the litigator, the witness, the skeptic, and the buyer.
Here is what all of it taught us: when it comes to a particular patent, almost nobody who explains it to you is disinterested.
Information in IP is notoriously self-interested, and so it is unreliable. Look at who you have to ask. The broker who wants the sale. The assertion shop that takes a cut of whatever it can squeeze, and that — as the FTC found when it studied these firms — often sues first and shares the proceeds with whoever sold it the patent. The litigation funder betting on the outcome. The valuation firm that knows a bigger number wins the next engagement. The opposing expert, paid to say the opposite. Every deep source of information about a specific patent has a financial stake in one position or another. What comes back is not a reading. It is a bid.
This is not a rounding error. Patent-assertion entities send infringement demands to thousands of companies and tend to sue the cash-rich ones — whether or not the cash has anything to do with the alleged infringement. One study put the lost wealth to defendants at roughly half a trillion dollars over two decades, and the activity is climbing again. A field that should run on evidence runs on leverage.
And it is not only the venal. Even an honest analyst distorts. Forty years ago Tversky and Kahneman warned that confirmation bias reaches trained professionals, not just amateurs, and the forensic sciences have spent the years since proving them right: when an examiner expects a match, ambiguous evidence starts to look like one. A patent analyst hired to find infringement will, with the best will in the world, find it. And the research is blunt about the cure — warning people about their bias does not work. Only deliberately going looking for what would prove you wrong does. Almost no infringement analysis is built that way.
So here is the irony at the center of intellectual property. It is a field that lives and dies on evidence and proof, and there is nowhere near enough science in how its most important questions actually get answered. Whether a product infringes. What a portfolio is worth. Who is using your invention without paying. Far too often, those are settled by incentive and instinct, not by method.
We are lawyers and inventors and storytellers, not AI evangelists. But our sister firm, DeepLaw, worked out something most of the law has not: how to make generative AI actually work for IP — bound to the evidence, made to show its sources, and stopped from the confident guessing that makes AI dangerous in legal hands. On top of that, Inventiply built the first method we know of for getting a complete, structurally unbiased read on a patent — who may be using it, what it is worth as a range you can defend, and what still has to be proven — in a fraction of the time and cost of the old way.
The difference is structural, and it is the whole point. We are not paid on the upside. We take no cut of an enforcement, no commission on a sale, no larger fee for a larger number. The report has no reason to inflate and every reason to be right. So we build it the way the bias research says you have to: we go hunting for what would prove us wrong, and where the proof is not there yet, we say so — on the page, in plain English a person who does not speak patentese can read.
You have probably been told your patents are worth a fortune, by someone who would profit if you believed it. You have probably been told they are worthless, by someone who would profit from that too. We will just tell you what is there.
A firm paid on the upside buries this paragraph. We are paid for the analysis, not the outcome — so it leads.
That one paragraph tells the owner where the bankable value sits, which patents carry upside that depends on better evidence, and why an aggressive ceiling figure should be read with both hands on the table.
The first report is free.
— Gary Shuster and Cameron Powell, founders, Inventiply