Latest from IPRally

When agentic AI tools entered the patent search market, quality became the topic everyone wanted to talk about, and one of the hardest to discuss honestly. Impressive-looking outputs are easy to generate, but outputs you can actually trust take a different kind of work. IPRally's co-founder and CPO Sakari Arvela breaks down what quality means for Agent, and shares the data behind that claim.

More people joined our Agent launch sessions than any webinar we've run, and the questions kept coming well after we wrapped. Thank you to everyone who joined! We couldn't address everything live, so we've compiled the most common and insightful ones here and given each the thorough answer it deserves. Whether you attended or are discovering Agent for the first time, we hope this is useful.

Today we're launching IPRally Agent, one of our most significant product releases to date. Agent automates the full novelty search workflow — from invention disclosure to structured, verifiable report — in minutes. Upload any combination of text, PDFs, images, or Office documents, and Agent identifies key claims and features, runs targeted searches across 120 million patents, and produces a feature chart, relevance-segmented results, and a written search report, with full transparency into every step of its reasoning. CPO and Co-founder Sakari Arvela outlines the thinking behind the release in this post.

Our recent introductory webinar sessions on Smart search were our most well-attended to date and sparked a highly engaged discussion. Thank you to everyone who joined us! While we addressed many questions during the live Q&A, we weren’t able to cover them all. In this follow-up post, we revisit the remaining questions and shares deeper insights into how to work effectively with Smart search in IPRally. Whether you attended one of the sessions or are exploring Smart search for the first time, we hope you’ll find the answers useful.

Today we're launching Smart search, our latest feature designed to respond to everyday realities and how patent professionals actually work. Smart Search accepts any combination of materials: text, images, PDFs, Microsoft Office documents, and uses AI to synthesize them into a search query representative of their technical content. This eliminates the need to manually piece together information from different sources, letting you work flexibly with whatever materials you have. Smart search is also a critical building block for the automated novelty search workflows in the forthcoming IPRally Agent.

We're excited to announce that IPRally has once again been recognized as one of Finland's fastest-growing technology companies, securing #26 on Deloitte's Technology Fast 50 list! This marks our second consecutive year earning this distinction, and we couldn't be prouder to stand among Finland's tech leaders.

The gap between AI hype and practical adoption in patent intelligence is wider than many realize. New AI capabilities emerge at breakneck speed, yet most IP professionals remain cautious or confused about how to leverage them effectively. In this post, Sakari Arvela shares insights on building trust in AI. Moving beyond abstract promises to transparent, testable solutions is essential. By launching AI capabilities in digestible chunks, building blocks for future automation, we help users build confidence step by step and demonstrate real value in patent workflows.

Traditionally, patentability searches have been manual, slow, and dependent on deep expertise, but that's changing. In last week’s blog post, we showed how IPRally makes it possible to complete a professional patentability search in minutes using natural language input. This week, we’ll explore another approach: image-based searches. Start with any image and carry it through to review with IPRally’s AI assistants. In many cases, you’ll uncover documents that a non-visual search would have missed.

Patentability searches are an important step in the intellectual property protection process and a common part of the innovation journey. Traditional search methods are slow, manual, and require deep expertise. With IPRally, you can complete a professional-quality patentability search in minutes, simply by entering natural language text. In this post, we’ll guide you through the process from setup to analysis, powered by graph-based search and AI assistants..

Invalidity searches are high-stakes and deadline-driven. Traditionally, these searches involve long hours crafting Boolean strings, combing through prior art, and trying to interpret obscure disclosures. With IPRally, you can start from a publication number, and uncover novelty-destroying prior art in just minutes. In this post, we'll show you how you can conduct a complete invalidity search in IPRally.

Last week’s webinar on Projects, AI assistants, and automation sparked a lot of great engagement. While we covered many questions during the live Q&A, we couldn’t get to everything. In this blog post, Sakari Arvela follows up on the questions from the session, offering deeper insights into how to work effectively with Projects, AI assistants, and automation in IPRally. Whether you attended the webinar or are just exploring the topics now, we hope you find the answers helpful.

In the past months, we’ve made major progress: improving performance, expanding features, and laying scalable foundations for true patent work automation. Soon, we’ll move toward fully automated workflows – freeing human expertise to focus where it’s needed most. IPRally’s CPO and co-founder Sakari Arvela reflects on what’s coming next, and what the future holds.

We're committed to maintaining the highest standards of information security for our clients. Here's an important update on our ongoing compliance efforts.

We're introducing a new feature to help you stay organised and efficient in IPRally: Projects. This update gives you more control over how related patent searches are grouped, reviewed, and managed – making your workflow smoother, cleaner, and easier to manage.

We're excited to introduce two new updates that push the boundaries of AI-driven patent search even further. Our latest advancements – an enhanced text-to-graph model and a powerful new node reranker – are designed to make your search experience more accurate and efficient. With the addition of the reranker, we now apply a second layer of ranking to search results, improving the quality of the top results. The improved graph parser not only boosts search accuracy but also lays the foundation for significant future developments. Here’s a look at what’s new and, more importantly, how it benefits you.

During our recent Custom AI Classifier webinar with Global Prior Art, we had an incredibly engaged audience who asked a wide range of insightful questions throughout the session. While we managed to address many questions during the webinar, we weren’t able to get to them all. To ensure everyone has access to the information, we’ve compiled a comprehensive Q&A with detailed answers to the remaining questions. A big thank you to everyone who joined and contributed to making the session so interactive!

Transforming visionary ideas into successful products is a high-risk, high-cost endeavor, and most innovation projects fail. One powerful yet underutilized tool for reducing this waste is patent information. By leveraging patent insights early in the innovation process, teams can avoid redundant efforts, anticipate competitive threats, and make smarter investment choices. In this post, we’ll explore five ways to cut R&D waste and maximize innovation using proactive patent intelligence and AI-driven insights.

As we step into the spring conference season of 2025, we’re excited to share the IP events we’ll be attending throughout the year. These conferences and summits offer great opportunities to connect, share insights, and explore the latest developments in IP. Whether we’re exhibiting, speaking, or simply attending, we look forward to meeting you on the road! The list is constantly growing, so stay tuned for more updates.

Thank you to everyone who attended our recent webinar on Smart filters and a special thank you to Hannu Huotari, Director, Strategic IP at ASM, who joined us as a guest speaker and presented a real-life use case. We had some great discussions, and we appreciated all the insightful questions from the audience. Below is a summary of the Q&A session, now enhanced with additional details about Smart filters' functionality, reliability, and best-use scenarios.

Today we launch Smart filters, our latest feature to redefine patent review. Pains that come with classical tedious manual review and filtering are replaced by a simple, conversational and proactive assistant that works like an extension of your team. Smart filters is a powerful and convenient alternative to complex Boolean filtering, and even more importantly, it can perform tasks that are practically impossible with Boolean. Read on as Sakari Arvela, CPO and Co-founder, details the impact and future of Smart filters.

We are excited to introduce a highly anticipated addition to IPRally: IPRally Lite. Designed to bridge the gap between IP, R&D and other stakeholders, IPRally Lite offers straightforward AI search capabilities, streamlined collaboration, and effortless access to patent information. Accessing insights, collaborating efficiently, and driving innovation has never been easier.

We’re excited to share that our Cyber Essentials certification has been renewed, reaffirming our commitment to robust cybersecurity practices.

Boston/Los Angeles. Today, we unveil a groundbreaking report on the global semiconductor patent landscape, produced by Global Prior Art (GPA) in collaboration with IPRally. Utilizing IPRally’s Custom AI Classifier as the primary research tool, this AI-driven study highlights critical trends, identifies key players, and challenges conventional perceptions in this high-stakes domain.

AI is transforming patent management, but how do you ensure a tool delivers on its promises? In this blog post, we recap the insights from Andreas Cehlinder’s recent webinar on evaluating AI tools for IP workflows.

Last week, Sakari Arvela spoke at IP Service World in Munich, sharing his insights on the impact of generative AI in the patent industry. Drawing from a recent survey of IPRally’s admin users, he explored the current state of AI adoption within IP teams, typical use cases, and future expectations surrounding AI's impact on patent processes. In this blog post, Sakari summarizes his presentation. We're moving past the initial generative AI hype and into practical implementation, he concludes in his key takeaways.

We’re thrilled to announce that IPRally has been recognized as one of the fastest-growing technology companies in Finland, securing #16 on Deloitte’s Technology Fast 50 list! This award highlights the rapid growth we’ve achieved in the past few years, and we couldn’t be prouder to be counted among Finland’s tech leaders.

Last week's Image Search webinar, hosted by Sakari Arvela and myself, was a great success with nearly 300 attendees from 27 countries. We had an incredibly engaged audience who asked about 60 questions throughout the session. While we addressed many questions during the webinar, we couldn't get to all of them. So we have compiled this Q&A to share comprehensive answers with everyone. Thank you to all who joined and made the session so interactive!

IPRally’s new feature Image Search is the first tool to combine image search with Graph AI. This practical solution allows you to find patents by simply uploading a photograph, a drawing or a product sheet. Unlike traditional image searches that rely on visual similarity, IPRally’s Image Search decodes the technical content in the image. Antti Tarvainen, Generative AI Product Manager, explains how Image Search works, its key benefits, and how it can transform how you conduct patent searches.

From streamlining tedious tasks to accelerating decision-making, we are getting closer to realizing the vision of patent work automation. Rather than removing humans from the loop entirely, the focus is on boosting work productivity, quality, and consistency of patent professionals. CPO and co-founder Sakari Arvela reflects on IPRally's achievements and future direction: “Gradually, IPRally will add AI assistants that solve parts of the process, and eventually, we’ll connect them to perform complete tasks in the value chain”, he shares in a blog post outlining IPRally’s vision.

From targeted patent summarization to detail extraction and ad hoc classification – never before has it been possible to review patents with such flexibility and efficiency. CPO and Co-Founder Sakari Arvela explores ten innovative ways to leverage IPRally's Ask AI for efficient patent review, illustrated with informative video clips. Join him as he showcases real-world applications and demonstrates how Ask AI lets you extract complex patent insights on the fly in a way that would have seemed like science fiction just a few years ago.

Over the past year, the progress with IPRally's search model has been tremendous, and the trend continues with the latest Graph Transformer 3.0. Recall metrics have improved to the point where today’s recall at 10 documents matches what it was at 20 documents a year ago. If this pace of development continues, Boolean searches might soon be history. Juho Kallio, CTO and Co-founder, provides context for this progress and explains why he wouldn't teach his son to write cumbersome Boolean queries.

IPRally adds an experienced CEO to the team to better support the delivery of leading AI solutions for the patent industry. As Sakari Arvela hands over the CEO responsibilities to Dennis van der Veeke, he will focus on product strategy in his new role as the Chief Product Officer (CPO).

The rise of artificial intelligence in the patent space brings both promises and challenges. With its potential to enhance drafting and examination processes, AI offers the prospect of improving patent quality. Join Sakari Arvela as he navigates through the opportunities, challenges, and ethical considerations inherent in this evolving landscape, while also presenting ideas for a healthier patent system.

A few days ago, the USPTO released additional guidelines about the use of AI in interactions with the USPTO. What do they mean in relation to using AI for patent research and analysis? Andreas Cehlinder gives a summary.

Amidst economic constraints, industry convergence, and the need for improved patent quality, patent workflows demand a paradigm shift to meet the evolving landscape. The current macro environment combined with the increasing maturity of AI initiatives opens up a unique window of opportunity to explore and take advantage of these innovative solutions. IPRally's CCO Andreas Cehlinder explains why the time for change is now.

Traditionally, patent review has been enhanced through approaches like data presentation and highlighting. Yet, remarkably few efforts have delved into the core of the challenge: the understanding of the technical substance of patents. The launch of Ask AI in September served as a brilliant testament to the viability of this effort. Now, we're thrilled to introduce Multi-patent Ask AI, designed to tackle large data sets and portfolios. Join us as Sakari Arvela, CEO and Co-founder, provides an insightful introduction.

In a short time, AI has integrated into numerous workflows, presenting a multitude of opportunities to revolutionize patent processes. Which ones of them will have the most impact? Sakari Arvela delves into the transformative impact of AI on IP management and introduces you to your new favorite IP channel.

Sakari Arvela, CEO and co-founder of IPRally, sets out his forecast for 2024. He predicts that AI will continue to shape the future of IP search with most progress being made in the intersection between generalist LLMs for text analysis and generation and specialist search models like Graph AI.

One more feather in IPRally’s security cap: Our Cyber Essentials certificate accompanies the ISO 27001 certification we achieved last year.

IPRally is converging the best from past and present technologies to help you do your patent research more efficiently. Bit by bit, we eliminate the manual tasks you want to get rid of.

We are delighted to introduce Graph Transformer 2.0, the latest advancement in our AI model, designed to elevate your patent search experience. In this blog post, we'll delve into the upgrades in our new model and how it significantly enhances patent search.

After a public procurement process with rigorous performance and security audits, the solution has been made available to the office's 110 patent examiners as an online tool.

We’re excited to announce that IPRally has achieved ISO 27001 certification, making us one of the few companies in our field to receive this designation. Great news for IPRally, but even more so for our customers.

We're thrilled to announce a major update to our core neural network architecture, which improves your patent search experience.

Defining class filters in Boolean searching is a challenging task due to the complicated classification systems. Graph-AI can mitigate the effect of human errors and biases and widen the horizon of prior art search.

We are witnessing the largest worldwide AI experiment ever, but how will AI change the patent industry?

Sakari Arvela and Jan C. Scholtes focus their attention on Large Language Models, the limitations of GPT, and how to improve today's models.

The A round is led by Endeit Capital together with previous investors Join Capital, Spintop Ventures and Icebreaker.vc.

We have received a lot of questions relating to the custom patent classifier. As many of them could be of general interest, we wanted to attempt to answer some of the more common ones here.

With the launch, IPRally adds additional strategic capabilities to their product, suitable for projects like portfolio segmentation, benchmarking and competitive intelligence.

In September, IPRally will launch an AI-based patent classifier. Sakari Arvela and Andreas Cehlinder shed some light on the new module that will allow users to create their own custom version of IPRally’s cutting-edge technology.

Tired of flipping back and forth between the patent drawings and the descriptions? IPRally now displays the technical part names in the drawings.

We were delighted to sit down with Kent Häll to discuss innovation workshops, knowledge graphs and the art of bridging the communication gap between lawyers and engineers.

What were some of the most impactful improvements in our patent search engine and what are our near-future plans?

We were very fortunate to have the opportunity to sit down with Jeremy Kriegel, Partner at Marshall IP, and learn how IPRally has changed the way this firm’s professionals support their clients.

Patent search engines are traditionally optimized for metrics like recall. But recall is a problematic metric. We are about to take a leap towards a new metric that more directly measures understanding.

After having been caught in the virtual world for almost two years, IPRally is enjoying the opportunity to meet with the IP community again.

Are your patent workflows cluttered with repetitive tasks and bottlenecks? What are you spending too much time on? The second part of our AI tool evaluation blog series discusses the topic of how to recognize the need for a patent AI tool.

The AI market is expected to grow 40% annually during the 2020s, and AI continues to play an increasing role in intellectual property management. Today we launch a blog series to shed some light on why and where to consider artificial intelligence for patent related tasks and how to evaluate if a tool fits your organization.

The latest addition to the IPRally board is a tech entrepreneur, angel investor and IP attorney.

Clojure is a functional programming language, written for those who seek simplicity. The combination of a better way to build and hire top talent can help a company to move faster.

The company starts a new sprint in AI development and global operations following a Seed investment round

The round is led by Join Capital and Spintop Ventures, with the participation of previous investor Icebreaker.vc.

An independent study confirms that IPRally significantly improves the quality of patent searches. Being the best performing AI platform tested, an average improvement of 29% was reported.

The amount of non-English patent documents is rapidly growing. To tackle the searchability problem, we are using machine translations to create English knowledge graphs from non-English texts.

The dynamic highlighting of the search results loads faster from now on. This is the first time we brought GPUs to the frontline, to speed up your user experience.

We used our model trained for prior art searches to classify patents into CPC classes. The performance we achieved is on par with the performance reported for state of the art classifiers in scientific articles.

Upon updating our database with millions of new documents, we expanded the filtering options with the new data sources so that you find faster the patent literature you are looking for. The database covers by now (May 2020) 75 million patents and patent applications.

Artificial intelligence (AI) opens up new opportunities to examine the patentability of inventions. The combination of AI and specialist work increases efficiency also in a telecommuting environment.

While working from home, our new UX designer Maggie connects with our customers and seeks to understand them better.

Google Cloud Pub/Sub is simple to use from Python, but what about Clojure? There is no official support and the Java interop is not straightforward. There are few libraries but none is active. We ended up building our internal mini-library jonotin, and today we have published the code.

Researchers have improved the widely used deep learning optimizer Adam, decreasing the time needed for training models and improving model generalization. We made a small contribution of our own by open sourcing our PyTorch implementation of QHAdamW.

The story of our first steps towards explainable patent search. In the end of the post you get to test our unique approach, which is one of the first few serious attempts to provide real world value from explainable NLP deep learning models.

Knowledge graphs are a great fit for patents. The benefits of a graph based patent search will be increasingly hard to compete with the traditional approaches.

IPRally won the most innovative AI startup award in North Star AI conference. The event had some star speakers like Estonian president Kersti Kaljulaid and DeepMind's Samuel Ritter.

The most notable IPR innovation award of Finland, granted by the IPR University Center, was given to IPRally.

Our story about utilising neural nets with tree like data. Can a Tree-LSTM model be used for real world applications? Turns out the answer is yes, but only after the performance is improved by 7000%.

The story of IPRally in a nutshell. From initial questions to validation of ideas and a working product.

Moving towards efficient patent searches requires better understanding of both the target of the search and the reason for the search. This post discusses this problematic and sligthly opens our approach to solving it.