Jeffrey Tiong was an intern in Philadelphia when he first got fed up with patents. His job at a small company called BioConnect Systems was to research and evaluate them. The government websites that held the records were hard to use, and the documents themselves, he later said, were rather abstruse. A biomedical engineering student from the National University of Singapore had a simple, irritated thought: someone should make this easy.
That irritation is the whole origin story. There is no famous family firm behind it, and little public record of his childhood. What there is, is a student who turned a complaint into a product. Back in Singapore he built a search engine for patents with help from NUS Enterprise. The Media Development Authority's iJam programme gave him S$55,000.
Patsnap stopped being a tool for patent attorneys and became a tool for the people who make products.
It was a small cheque for a hard job. Patent data sits in dozens of national offices, in different formats and languages. Making it searchable for a company, not a lawyer, meant years of unglamorous work. Tiong brought in Markus Haense as technology chief, Ray Chohan for new ventures and Guan Dian to run Asia Pacific.
The turn came when the buyers changed. Patsnap stopped being a tool for patent attorneys and became a tool for the people who make products. Engineers and R&D teams could check whether an idea already existed before spending money on it. Subscriptions ran about US$20,000 to US$30,000 a year for typical clients, around US$5,000 for startups with limited use, and up to US$500,000 for giants such as Dyson and DJI. By 2021 the company counted more than 10,000 customers, among them Spotify and Xiaomi, and had over 700 staff.
The investors followed. Vertex Ventures, an early backer, led the Series A. In 2018 Sequoia and Shunwei Capital led a US$38 million Series D. In March 2021 SoftBank's Vision Fund 2 and Tencent led a US$300 million Series E that took the valuation above US$1 billion.
The quiet cost of a company like this is time. It took well over a decade from a Philadelphia internship to a unicorn round, and almost none of that decade made headlines. Patsnap also depends on patent offices it does not control, and on customers who can cancel a subscription.
Tiong's lesson is a small one and easy to miss. He did not set out to build a unicorn. He set out to fix the thing that annoyed him most as a student, and he kept fixing it until other people were willing to pay for the fix.