Toronto-based intellectual property (IP) software startup NLPatent is rebranding to Clerq as it looks to better serve legal teams contending with a surge in complex patent applications.
The company announced its new identity on Tuesday, in addition to an agentic AI overhaul of its platform that introduces more tools that can take action on a userâs behalf. Clerq says its new platform builds time-saving features on top of its proprietary research engine, which was originally developed to help patent professionals search and analyze patents using plain-text descriptions.
Co-founded by patent lawyer Stephanie Curcio in 2021, Clerq originally developed a machine learning research platform for patent-related work. But as more people use generative AI tools to take on work, the floodgates have opened for patent applications. According to the World Intellectual Property Organization, more than 56,000 new patent families (groups of related applications) related to generative AI were published in 2024 and 2025 aloneâmore than the output of the entire previous decade.
“A crazy perfect time”
This trend has also coincided with a global surge in general patent volume, according to Curcio, as patent offices at large corporations and law firms face a backlog of applications. However, in Canada, patent applications have remained relatively flat over the past few years despite population growth. The Canadian Intellectual Property Office recorded a one-percent decrease in patent filings year over year in 2024. In the US, they fell by nine percent that year.
Still, patent offices are struggling to keep up. âWhen you have that backlog, it discourages innovation at your company,â Curcio said in an interview. Thatâs because inventors might be waiting months to hear back about an invention.
The CEO added that AI is not only adding to the backlog, but often making applications more lengthy and difficult to parse. âSomething that would have been three or four pages is now 20 or 30 pages,â Curcio said. âItâs a crazy perfect time to be building this exact thing.â
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As agentic workflows grew in popularity last year, Curcio said she realized that NLPatentâs research engine had the âperfect foundations to provide the agent with necessary context.â
In practice, that looks like an AI triage assessment for screening inventions and a âpatentability reportâ that indicates whether an invention is patent-worthy, given existing records, or whether similar inventions already exist. Clerq is also adding integrations with RPX Corporation, a risk-management provider for patents, as well as Park IP, which offers global patent translations and foreign filing services. Clerq says the new platform reduces many common patent-related workloads from days to minutes.
Clerq, which has roughly 25 employees, sells its platform to patent and IP lawyers at law firms like Gowling WLG, as well as in-house patent teams at corporations; it counts roughly 100 client organizations and thousands of users.
The company is also adding an IP expert to its executive team: Michael Chernoff, who most recently led a patent research team at Murgitroyd and previously was on Clerqâs client advisory board. The company said Chernoff will lead enterprise sales support and customer success for Clerq while setting new product directions.
Feature image courtesy Harry Murphy/Collision via Sportsfile.