Jeffrey Tiong studied biomedical engineering at the National University of Singapore. While interning at BioConnect Systems in Philadelphia, he was asked to research and evaluate patents. The government sites that held the records were hard to use, and the documents were dense.
Back in Singapore he built a patent search engine with support from NUS Enterprise. The Media Development Authority's iJam programme gave him S$55,000. He brought in Markus Haense as chief technology officer, Guan Dian to run Asia Pacific and Ray Chohan for new ventures.
Patsnap moved from patent attorneys to the people who make products. Engineers and R&D teams could check whether an idea already existed before spending money on it. Typical subscriptions ran about $20,000 to $30,000 a year, and clients included Dyson and DJI.
Vertex Ventures led the Series A. Sequoia and Shunwei Capital backed a $38 million Series D in June 2018. In March 2021 SoftBank Vision Fund 2 and Tencent Investment led a $300 million Series E. By then Patsnap had more than 10,000 customers and over 700 staff.