Denver-based intellectual property marketplace Collective IP announced a $2.5 million Series A round today from High Country Venture and TechStars founder David Cohen. The round, which puts Collective IP’s total funding at $3.6 million since 2011, will hopefully push the platform out of beta sometime within the next year, founder and COO Adam Rubenstein said.
Right now, about 100 users, including research institutions, Fortune 500 companies and major biopharmaceutical companies, are using and providing feedback on Collective IP so that it can continue to match global R&D teams up with products developed by smaller companies and academics.
"From the consumption side, we are hearing back from them that this is indeed the most comprehensive and accurate product that they’ve been exposed to,” Rubenstein said. “From the content creation side, the feedback has been that this is a novel marketing platform for the technology transfer offices, universities and small companies to help them improve their visibility in front of their target markets.”
Not only is Collective IP connecting both sides of the market through its vast database of intellectual property, or a “catalogue of innovation” as Rubenstein put it, but it’s doing it fast.
Time is an essential aspect for R&D teams looking for intellectual property because patents are only valid for a limited amount of time (something Rubenstein learned from his previous roles at a technology transfer office and at a biopharmaceutical company). Because Collective IP allows R&D teams to spend less time to looking for new products, then the team will have more time to actually use the products.
[ibimage==24526==Large==none==self==ibimage_align-center]The time-saving marketplace has been embraced so far by users, like University of Colorado Boulder researchers, who have already claimed their marketable ready-made Collective IP profile. “We do a lot of the hard work, of marketing their intellectual property, for them,” Chief Marketing Officer Dru Jacobs said.
Fueled by positive reinforcement from both users and investors, Rubenstein said Collective IP’s nine-person team will definitely be expanding on the business and engineering sides over the next year to execute its plan of attack, which is first to build out the next generation of the platform and then to make it available for sale.