Four years ago, intellectual property (IP) lawyer and NLPatent co-founder and CEO Stephanie Curcio set out to make her colleagues’ lives easier, with the help of artificial intelligence (AI).
Curcio knew it was difficult and time-consuming to retrieve relevant patent documents through keyword searches that often failed to capture the nuanced language of inventions. So she teamed up with co-founder and CTO James Stonehill—an experienced software engineer—to build a better way.
Stephanie Curcio,
“Our vision is for NLPatent to be the infrastructure, the operating system behind how patent work gets done in the AI era.”
NLPatent
“I was persuaded to leave my legal practice because I saw an opportunity to create a business around a new technology that was so obviously applicable to the work that I was doing as a lawyer,” Curcio told BetaKit in an interview.
Since then, the Toronto-based legaltech startup has developed what Curcio described as “a complete research platform.” She claims NLPatent helps more than 2,000 IP and research and development (R&D) professionals—across leading IP law firms, Fortune 500 companies, and universities—make better, faster decisions with the help of natural language processing.
“NLPatent is a lot more than just a search tool today … We’ve taken that concept of just surfacing relevant documents to the next level,” Curcio said.
This progress has helped NLPatent secure $3 million USD in fresh financing, co-led by two new Silicon Valley-based investors in Draper Associates and Mighty Capital. The all-equity, all-primary capital round, which closed in September, was supported by existing backers including Miami-based The LegalTech Fund, Toronto’s Storytime Capital, and Calgary-based The51.
Curcio said NLPatent intends to use this money to expand its presence across North America and Europe. It also aims to accelerate its product development plans, which include evolving its AI capabilities and building “fully agentic workflows that execute complex patent tasks.”
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“That’s the exciting thing, the sexy thing that we’re building,” Curcio said. “We’ve been doing the boring stuff up to this point, but in my opinion, you need to do the boring stuff to give you a right to win at the sexy, exciting stuff.”
NLPatent’s AI-based patent search and analytics software includes modules for searching, monitoring, and visualizing patent documents and trends based on proprietary, domain-tuned large-language models. Curcio said the company helps organizations gather business intelligence based on those documents to make more informed IP or R&D decisions.
“Our vision is for NLPatent to be the infrastructure, the operating system behind how patent work gets done in the AI era,” Curcio said.
NLPatent previously raised $1.4 million CAD in funding across a $1-million equity seed round in October 2023 that Storytime led, with participation from The LegalTech Fund and The51, plus $400,000 worth of simple agreements for future equity since then. Curcio said NLPatent aims to raise a larger Series A at a later date.
AI is already disrupting the legal industry in a variety of ways, and investors appear to have recognized this: amid the AI boom, funding for legaltech companies has been on the rise this year. Law360 found that legaltech financing surged 80 percent year-over-year in the first quarter.
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Earlier this week, Burnaby-based legaltech firm Clio announced that it had closed a $500-million USD Series G, $350 million in debt, and a $1-billion deal to buy vLex as it bets big on AI playing a “foundational” role in the future of legal software.
“[Patent] professionals are no longer sort of sitting on the sidelines wondering if AI is going to take off—the train has left the station,” Curcio said.
Curcio acknowledged that activity in the AI for IP space has been heating up, and said that it is “cool to see as an early mover.” Last month, Silicon Valley’s Perplexity announced a tool aimed at simplifying patent research. Earlier this year, New York’s Patlytics closed a $14-million Series A to expand its own patent analytics platform, while Delaware’s Solve Intelligence secured a $12-million Series A to fuel similar efforts.
The CEO said she believes that NLPatent’s head start and the reputation it has built within this patent space will continue to set the startup apart as more players develop AI for IP solutions.
“We went through a lot of pain in the early days to build something that delivers on the promise of what it’s supposed to do,” Curcio added.
Feature image courtesy NLPatent.