For most of our life as a company, we’ve been obsessed with one thing: patent search. We bet early that the right way to find prior art wasn’t Boolean strings or black-box semantic search, but a model that thinks about technology the way a patent professional does. Years of AI research and building the product environment around it, have resulted in something that I as a modest Finn don’t say lightly: we’ve become the best in the world at patent search.
That’s a foundation worth being proud of. But it was never the whole story.
Over the past couple of years, we started reaching beyond the single search task into patent intelligence: helping customers not just find a document, but understand their whole landscape – portfolios, competitors, white space, technology trends. And today I want to share where this is heading, because we’re drawing the map more clearly than we ever have.
We’re organizing everything we do around three product pillars: Search, Intelligence, and Protection. Three teams, three promises, and one of them is brand new.
Why three pillars, and why now
Patent and R&D workflows are changing faster than at any point in my twenty years in this field. Agents are starting to do real work. Systems talk to systems. Search alone is never the whole job, but part of a process or workflow. And that’s exactly where we are going: building and enabling automated workflows without diluting the quality that got us here. On the contrary, maximizing the added value of high-quality searches in real operations that are in the core of our customer’s businesses.
So we’ve given each pillar a clear mission, a dedicated team, and end-to-end ownership of its outcomes. Each pillar is a team, a verb, and a promise to a user. Our ambition across all three is simple to state and hard to do: be the go-to place for both micro- and macro-level patent information, and the smartest, most patent-professional-like invention protection engine in the world. From invention disclosures to patenting decisions, to drafts, to filings, to prosecution, eventually to defensible patents and patent portfolios.
Pillar 1 – Search: Find
Search is our foundation, and we’re doubling down on it. The goal isn’t just a better query box. It’s to deliver an automated patent searcher with outcome quality on par with, or better than, human experts, across novelty, invalidity and freedom-to-operate searches. And to become a cornerstone that agentic and other automation ecosystems can be built on.
The shift we’re chasing here is a mindset shift. Today a professional still asks, “Should I run a search?” – and weighs the time and effort against the value. We want to erase that hesitation entirely. The future we’re building moves you from “should I make a search” to “I already have the answers.” The evidence is simply there, grounded, explainable, ready to act on.
Pillar 2 – Intelligence: Understand
If search answers a question, intelligence answers the questions you didn’t know to ask. This pillar is about next-level patent intelligence: portfolio analysis, competitor and technology landscapes, benchmarking, and continuous monitoring – the kind of strategic understanding that R&D leaders, Heads of IP and C-level executives rely on.
Our aim is for IPRally to become the patent intelligence substrate: the service that effective R&D and IP processes quietly run on. When people, tools, agents or whole systems need an answer they can defend, they call IPRally.
The before-and-after here is one every IP team will recognize. Too often, “we don’t really understand our competitive landscape” is met with reasons why – it’s too big, it’s too slow and expensive to map. We want to replace the excuses with a landscape report that’s already waiting for you. Not a project you dread starting, but an answer that’s already on the table.
Pillar 3 – Protection: Protect
This is the new one, and the one I’m personally knees deep in.
The Protection pillar covers the path from idea to granted right: innovation support, invention disclosure handling, drafting, and office action work. Our goal is to make that path as smooth as possible.
For my entire career as a patent attorney, drafting has happened in the dark. You write claims and a specification with only a partial, hard-won sense of what’s already out there, and you find out how good your guess was much later – often during examination, sometimes years later. That’s slow, expensive, and it quietly lowers the quality of patents everywhere.
We think that era is over. Because we already have the best search and intelligence in the world, we can make protection prior-art aware from the very first sentence. Imagine AI listening in an R&D meeting and providing a list of patentable aspects and competitor insights before the meeting even ends. Imagine drafting where the relevant art is surfaced as you write, where claim scope is informed by evidence, not instinct. The payoff is concrete: earlier filing dates, real cost savings, and – the thing that matters most to me – higher-quality patents that hold up.
This is where ideas become defensible business, already aware of the art.
And to not forget: It would not hurt to bring a pinch of joy and fun to these rather analytical, yet mechanical tasks!
What this means for you
Pillars aren’t just a tidy way to draw an org chart. The structure is the point. Each pillar has a dedicated team that owns a clear mission, staying close to the customers it serves, with fewer hand-offs and faster decisions. It lets our people go deep and become genuine experts in the areas that are mission-critical – both for us and for you.
For our customers, that should translate into things you can feel: we’ll listen even more sharply, ship better and more focused features, publish clearer roadmaps, and turn work around faster. Small, dedicated, accountable teams can achieve a remarkable amount in this new era – and we intend to prove it.
Search, Intelligence, Protection. Find, Understand, Protect. We’ve spent years earning the right to lead in the first place. Now we’re building the next two with the same high standard and ambition level.
Can’t wait to show you what’s next!
More from Sakari Arvela
What does quality actually mean for automated patent search?
In tangible chunks: a clearer path to patent intelligence automation
On the path to automated patent workflows
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