Lightbringer, a startup aiming to streamline the patent process for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), has successfully raised €850,000 in its seed funding round. The investment comes from Skåne Ventures (backed by Minc, Ideon Innovation, Hetch, and Krinova), Johan Billgren (co-founder of InRiver), Jimmy Lundström (co-founder of Refined), Likeminded, and co-founder Johannes Bolvede. Despite the funding, the founding team retains a majority stake in the company.
The funding will enable us to move forward more rapidly, hire a larger development team, more salespeople, and marketing professionals,” said Dominic Davies.
Lightbringer’s platform aims to make the traditionally time-consuming and costly patent process more accessible, faster, and cheaper for innovative companies. The platform uses a subscription model, making it easier for businesses to budget for patent costs.
The vision is to fully automate this process, but if you’ve used ChatGPT, you know that the technology is still somewhat limited, and you can’t always rely on it. So today, we have a hybrid system of AI and human patent attorneys,” said Davies.
The idea is that the AI-powered platform will handle the task of formulating and managing patent applications, but there’s still a human element involved. “Our platform interviews the inventors and helps them describe and document their technology. The AI prepares a patent application and presents it to a patent attorney who provides feedback and makes corrections before it is sent off.”
Lightbringer has recently signed a partnership agreement with the IP law firm Bergenstråhle & Partners, which provides manual patent advice.
I believe we will see a largely fully automated process within two years, with continuous improvements along the way,” said Dominic Davies.
Lightbringer is primarily targeting small and medium-sized enterprises with up to 20 patents in their portfolio. The next step is to reach more of them. “There are a huge number of such companies globally. We aim to reach them all, in principle. There is no reason why we cannot expand to the rest of Europe, the UK, and the US.”
By the end of September, the company will employ 15 people and has recently recruited a salesperson dedicated to the UK market.
The future for Lightbringer is very much global expansion, that is our ambition.
This article is a translation of Rapidu’s article in Swedish. Click to read it.
