Tangibly, a cloud-based trade secrets management platform, has completed an oversubscribed $6.5 million seed round, which it plans to use to further develop its recently launched Patent X-Ray, a tool powered by large language model artificial intelligence to help companies identify possibly undocumented trade secrets from their own patents.
The round was led by Madrona Venture Group and included participation from Spike Ventures, Volo Ventures, Holt Ventures, MVP Ventures, Incisive Ventures, WS Investment Company (an affiliate of law firm Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati) and DLA Piper.
The company last year raised $1.3 million in pre-seed financing. Madrona and WS Investment had also participated in that round.
“Trade secrets are fast becoming the most important category of intellectual property assets, and the need for better enterprise tools to manage them is clear to global enterprises across industries,” Tim Londergan, Tangibly’s cofounder and CEO, said in a statement. “We are thrilled to have such a high-quality group of investors helping us accelerate our product roadmap and expand our go-to-market initiatives.”
Tangibly launched in February 2022 as the first cloud-based IP platform to systematically help companies identify and catalog trade secrets and transform them into protected assets. One early investor was Mark Britton, the former founder and CEO of Avvo, who told me at the time that companies lack the ability to protect the “brilliant ideas that they can’t patent.”
“Tangibly changes this – their software keeps brilliant ideas where they belong – inside the brilliant companies that originated them,” Britton said.
In May, Tangibly launched Patent X-Ray on an early-access basis to inhouse legal teams and law firms. It enables a user to simply input a patent number, and it then produces descriptions of potential trade secrets, predicted based on Tangibly’s proprietary algorithm. It also predicts the importance of the trade secret and its vulnerability. If the user accepts its suggestions, they are automatically added to the compliance and management workflow on Tangibly’s platform.
Tangibly said that the next generation of Patent X-Ray is currently in internal testing. It will assist users in the patent drafting process, helping them better identify what information to disclose in the patent and what information to protect as a trade secret.
Madrona partner Aseem Datar, a Tangibly board member, said that the company has anticipated a critical and rapidly growing need in trade secret management.
“AI can be applied to so many industries, the power comes when experts and internal enterprise data come together,” Datar said. “We are excited to back this talented team that offers global enterprises a valuable platform for innovation intelligence across their intellectual property portfolio.”
