Singapore’s unicorn Patsnap to expand AI-powered patent search

Patsnap, a Singaporean startup that helps businesses search for and analyze patent information, is starting to offer more services tailored to specific industries by increasingly tapping generative artificial intelligence (AI).

Co-founder Guan Dian told Nikkei Asia in a recent interview that the company, whose more than 12,000 corporate clients include Tesla, Siemens and NASA, aims to win more customers across fields such as pharmaceuticals and material sciences through the new services.

Patsnap's generative AI uses chatbots to answer questions from researchers and intellectual property lawyers, helping them understand complex patent documentation in different regions -- something that could otherwise be a huge undertaking when companies are looking to launch products or enter new markets. The services also help clients track any recent technological advances by their competitors.

The startup's large language model has been trained using Meta's open-source AI model after accumulating data from 200 million patents, a million scientific and technical books, and billions of new articles and other sources.

Guan described Patsnap's AI model as a "specialist" that can help experts in different fields seek more technical information, whereas she said existing services like ChatGPT are more for wider general knowledge