Singapore startup uses AI to search patents and designs, preparing to enter Japan

This article is adapted from Nikkei

The original article is in Japanese and the following is the English translated version by Google Translate and slightly enhanced by Vertex Ventures SEA Marketing team.

[NQN Singapore = Akiyama Fumito] In business, understanding the positioning of your own technology is essential for research and development. But, in order to do that, you will have to thoroughly search patents from all over the world. To save a huge amount of time, Singapore company Patsnap is developing a search engine that uses artificial intelligence (AI).

Technology-Specialized LLM

In the Patsnap product, you type into the chat box about the technology you are thinking of researching, and it will show you relevant patent and non-patent literature, as well as technological insights. And if there are any relevant patents, what kind of technology they are. The data is based on 200 million patents, 190 million non-patent documents, 2 billion news articles, 1 million scientific and technical books, 879 million biological sequences and 254 million chemical structures from around the world. Trained LLM to provide answers.

"Our platform is very different from Open AI, Google and other big US companies. They are like an encyclopaedia. Patsnap delivers domain-specific insights for IP and R&D teams," says Guan Dian, co-founder and APAC general manager, Patsnap

What does a patent- or technology-specific search look like? For example, if you are searching for suitable packaging for your product, our platform will prompt you for more details with questions such as "What kind of material do you want?", "Is it medical or food grade?", "Do you want it to be recyclable?" and so on. "It produces very specialised answers, including parameters and experimental data, and also displays links to relevant patents and literature" said Guan Dian.

It covers not only technology but also design. 'You can see in less than a minute whether our your design is new or similar and can decide whether to change the design or not'. As well as searching, Patsnap also uses AI to produce research reports.

Patsnap has been working on AI-based patent search technology since around 2014. "At that point, the concept of LLM had not yet come to the fore, but we had already developed other AI capabilities in the area of patent search." The company's customers are R&D departments in companies, research institutes and universities all over the world. Publicly listed customers include names such as Adobe.

Patsnap’s customers include some of the world's most innovative organisations such as NASA, Tesla, Disney, Huawei, Adobe, Siemens AG, The Dow Chemical Company, Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, and National University of Singapore.

Japan is a key market for Patsnap, and Dian has been visiting the country frequently since last year. "All the Japanese we met were using the Copilot," she says. I felt the penetration rate was much higher than our Western customers. She was also surprised to find bookshops crammed with AI-related books. Japan is one of the first countries in the world to embrace the AI boom."

Carefully Preparing to enter Japanese market

According to the 2024 Information and Communications White Paper, the percentage of people using generative AI in Japan is 9.1%, lagging behind the United States at 46.3% and Germany at 34.6%. However, when it comes to Japanese people involved in research and development, Guan's testimony shows that the country is rapidly adopting generative AI, even among the world's largest companies.

What industries use Patsnap's services in Japan? "Automobiles, in particular, have the largest R&D expenditure in the world. Chemicals and pharmaceuticals are also strong."

Patsnap has prepared carefully for its entry into Japan. Japanese language is a language barrier. The Japanese demand high quality and are less forgiving than the US and China. It is a very challenging market, so we stayed carefully until we could offer the best product". From our studies of the market, there are thousands of potential customers in Japan, but at present we secured about 200 and "we are just getting started."

Patsnap is funded by the SoftBank Group . "We are impressed by how well it has spread among Japanese industry leaders," says Dennis Chan, managing partner at SoftBank Investment Advisers.

Japan: "AI will be heavily used in the future"

Similar sentiments have been heard from other AI companies: "Japanese is structurally difficult, and expectations for quality are high," said Sandie Overtveld, head of Asia Pacific, Japan, Middle East and Africa markets at Freshworks, an Indian customer relationship management (CRM) services company.

Freshworks provides software for business management, customer support, sales support, and marketing support using chat, as a SaaS (Software as a Service) that delivers software via the cloud. The company provides its services globally. The chatbot is equipped with AI and generates sentences in natural language. "The sentences are so natural that it is difficult to tell whether they were written by a person or generated by a chatbot," says Obertveld.

He has lived in Japan and is familiar with Japanese business. Unlike Patsnap's Guan shared, he points out that the spread of AI is lagging behind Europe and the United States, but says, "In my experience, once guidelines are introduced and companies determine that it is safe, the spread will progress extremely quickly," and expects that "Given that we must continue to grow despite the labor shortage due to the declining population, Japan will become the world's largest country in terms of the spread of AI in the future."

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