Major Funds for Global R&D Analyst PatSnap

London-based PatSnap, which analyses research and development (R&D) activity around the world, has raised $38m in a Series D investment round. The money will help it to accelerate its own R&D, and to capitalise on opportunities for rapid global expansion.

Founded in 2007, PatSnap boasts 'the world's most comprehensive R&D dataset', built by combining millions of data points from patents, licensing, litigation, and company information with non-patent literature.

The round, which brings total funding to more than $100m, was led by Sequoia Capital and Shunwei Capital, with participation from Qualgro - all three are previous investors. Not all the money from its November 2016 Series C round, led by Sequoia, has yet been spent, despite the launching in those eighteen months of an R&D centre in Singapore, a first North American office in LA and a major programme of recruitment which has doubled the global employee base.

Steven Ji, Partner at Sequoia Capital, says the company has brought new clients on-board at 'a phenomenal rate, demonstrating that there is real appetite in the market for tools which can help companies accelerate their rate of innovation'. He adds that the firm has established 'a unique position of being the undisputed leader in SaaS for R&D teams across Asia, North America, and Europe'.

Founder and CEO Jeffrey Tiong (pictured right), comments: 'We have recently made a number of strategic leadership appointments across US, Europe and Asia, and find ourselves in a very strong position to grow into different countries and industries, and develop even more innovative solutions for our clients. We will also be opening our second North American office in Toronto to better service our clients on the East coast, and to support the huge amount of innovation that is taking place there'.

SVP Corporate Strategy Ray Chohan (pictured left) says 'businesses worldwide are investing a significant proportion of their turnover in R&D, but a large proportion of that money is wasted developing ideas that will never achieve a return on investment. Through the use of big data, analytics and machine learning, we are giving innovation leaders the data they need to make better decisions around their R&D and investment strategy'.

More than half of PatSnap's c.8,000 global clients are in China, as are three of its six global addresses. The company is online at www.patsnap.com .

All articles 2006-23 written and edited by Mel Crowther and/or Nick Thomas, 2024- by Nick Thomas, unless otherwise stated.