2333 - Affordable Solutions for Patent Filing and Protection with senseIP's Ophir Katzir

0:04Well, hey, Thoughtful Leader. Welcome to the Thoughtful Entrepreneur. On this show, I interview purpose-driven founders, experts, and change makers who are making a real impact in the world. Want to be a guest? Simple. Go to upmyinfluence.com and click podcast. I'd love to promote your story to our audience of over 100 ,000 and across over 2 ,300 daily episodes and counting. Want to get booked on other great shows like this? Simple. Go to podverified.com and get your free guest authority score. Thousands of hosts are looking for high quality guests and Podverified connects you the right way. Now let's dive into today's episode.

0:58With us right now is Ophir Katsir. Ophir, you are the CEO and co-founder at Sense IP, and your website is senseip.ai. Well, Ophir, it's great to have you. Thank you, Josh. Thanks for having me. Excited to talk about this topic before we do. I always love kind of finding out what our leaders are kind of into when they're not at work. You know, hobbies, movies, music, TV shows, games, you know, just something that you're geeking out on currently. What are you currently into? Well, for the last 10 plus years, I've been an active volunteer firefighter, which means not just dealing with fires, virtual fires at work on startups, but also actual fires in town.

1:46Oh, my goodness. It's very exciting. You meet amazing people in the service with you, people that usually in the startup world, you won't necessarily have the opportunity to meet. and the state of mind, there are so many similarities between how to handle a scene of an incident and how to handle a startup. Putting fires off is something that works in both worlds and there's so many similarities. So every day when I get the pager call and I need to rush into a fire or any incident to help, I get excited not only about the actual rush of adrenaline and of doing something important for the community.

2:30But also, I'm always a little bit having fun about what can I derive from that to my work-related world and life. And there are so many things. It's worth a dedicated podcast by itself. Yeah. Well, obviously, you're not doing it for the money. That's volunteering, yeah. So what is it that, and I appreciate your insight on that, like what provoked you to think about volunteering for your local fire department? Well, growing up in Israel, we were told and taught to be part of the community, to always contribute, to always volunteer. And when I moved to the U.S. and I said with my wife that this will be our house, this town is going to be our hometown, and this is where we're going to raise our kids.

3:24it was important for me to try and give back to the community and be involved. And of all the things that were available for me, I thought that firefighting is exciting. It's non-trivial and it's really required. I mean, most of the firefighters in the U.S., more than 73 % are volunteers. Most of the departments are fully volunteers. This is something that goes back to Benjamin Franklin with the volunteer battalion of the buckets. So it's an American tradition. You meet amazing people. You learn a lot and it puts your life in perspective. No kidding. My gosh. Well, Ophir, very, very cool. I could talk to you about this topic, the whole conversation.

4:11We need to talk about intellectual property and what Sense IP does. Give us an overview of what Sense IP is. so again talking from my own experience ever since I was a kid I always thought about small you know gimmicks gizmos I have so many pages of ideas that I wrote down over the years and every few weeks or months I hear about something that I thought many years ago and became commercial success I go to tell my wife and she looks at me great and what did you do about that. So I know that a lot of other people like me have ideas. I strongly believe that every person out there in the world have ideas.

4:56And most ideas, you know, may be not valid, but some of them are amazing and will never have the chance to succeed because people don't know what to do. The system, not just the intellectual property and patent system, but the system in general is not build to help individual inventors to pursue their dreams. We built SenseAP to try and fix that problem. We believe that everyone deserves a chance with this idea, and we want to give everyone the best available head start on their idea. And it goes as simple as if you have even a single sentence, a highlight of what you're thinking about, it's good enough to start a conversation with our AI chat, chat agent named Leo.

5:42And with a simple process that takes only a few minutes, we can boil down your idea to what's the core concepts behind it and verify these concepts against everything else out there. So you know what you're competing against. You can find the unique take and the unique angle that will make your idea better and potentially successful. So during this process, which you're not talking to a lawyer with complex jargon and issues. You're speaking in a very simple English conversation with a very friendly AI bot. And at the end of this process, you know what's unique about your idea. You can see what's your competition.

6:24You ensure that you have what's called freedom to operate. So if you will pursue your dream, no one will be able to claim that you are infringing their ideas. And with a single click, we can also protect your idea with a provisional patent application, which means you started this process on the right foot and you can go ahead and pursue your dream. This whole process that sounds like a very complex one and historically with patent attorneys would take you weeks. Well, our record is six and a half minutes. And it's very affordable. So we believe we were able to lower the bar, if you will, for innovation and democratize this world.

7:04That's what SenseiP is all about, to make sure that we bring more ideas to the world. We ensure that they're better. We protect them. And we let the world enjoy those amazing ideas. Yeah. So I understand that if someone wants to file a patent, obviously, you know, there's a process for that. You want to do some research. You want to get it filed. And I understand where there's kind of a, you know, there's some upfront fees for that work. And obviously that's a part of Sense IP. But you have ongoing monthly services. What's included in that? And why would someone need ongoing services around their intellectual property?

7:49Well, one of the things that people don't really necessarily know when they talk to a patent attorney because they want to patent their invention is that they will get quoted for drafting and file a patent. But that's only the beginning of the process. Down the road, when the patent office will start examining this patent, you will need to pay your lawyers for the examination. Each time the examiner rejects and has any rejections to your application and your patent attorney need to respond to it, it's billable hours and it adds up to a lot. We promise as part of our service that those costs of the examination will be part of the preset cost, which is very affordable at the beginning.

8:34So until the patent is granted, you don't pay anything more because you don't have to. We believe that if you write the patents correctly, and with the algorithms that we built, we write them in a way that no human patent attorney can. So if you write those patents and drop them correctly from the get-go, the likelihood of having expensive and long-lasting examinations diminishes significantly. So if there will be office actions, we handle that automatically. And there's no reason to offload those expenses to the user. And Ophir, I would imagine in your life, you've worked with some really cool innovations.

9:23What have you been seeing? And maybe they could, I don't know if it falls under category of how AI is enabling a lot of these innovations. But what have you been seeing lately that you're excited about this year? maybe clients that have been filing things, folks that you've talked with. I think that AI enables us to kind of bring those top-level ideas to market so much easier and certainly ideate on them and really kind of come up with a fully fleshed out idea as opposed to maybe just a fleeting thought. We can actually dig down and explore this stuff, and AI can really help you with that. But getting back to my original question, trends that you're seeing right now that you're excited about in this world?

10:14So definitely the AI changes a lot. This is a revolution that we don't even understand its scope yet. You can see it in everyday usage and you can see how fast things are. People can just think and write down their idea and let the AI actually implement that, especially in software-related aspects. We see, when we're looking at the patent world, we do see a significant tick in increased filing in areas related to AI. I'm very excited about, especially because over the last 20 years, give or take, there were a lot of back and forth about whether software-related patents can be patentable, whether an abstract idea can be patentable.

11:02And there were a few rulings by the Supreme Court that sent back the patent office to do its homework. And unfortunately, the Congress haven't passed a ruling that will fix that yet. We do see, although a lot of applications around AI. This is something that the patent office in the U.S., not just the U.S., the patent offices needs to deal with. I think it's exciting. It's amazing. I'm afraid that outside of the patent office, though, because of the availability of AI tools, the regular, the common people will try to use that and skip some steps in their path. So sometimes you tend to forget that the fact that you talk to AI doesn't promise you any secrecy.

11:55It doesn't promise you that this AI won't use the data you punched in to train itself against others. So if you're sharing your idea with an AI, it might be a problem. You might actually disclose your invention before you want it. If you try to run faster with the AI for implementation and you forget that you actually need to stop for a sec and protect yourself, that's a problem. Now, a lot of people would say, yes, software patents, it's irrelevant. It's too slow. I would agree that it's slow with the traditional patent attorneys. What I'm excited about is to see how the revolution of the AI, combined with our contribution through the SenseAP platform, can actually accommodate the fast pace of inventorship and AI usage to invent with the level of protection and the extra, I would say, knowledge about what you're fighting against.

12:54It's not just defense, it's also competitive edge. It's also, you know, being able to find the right angle for your invention based on analyzing patents so that you can find a unique path. Yeah. And, you know, obviously, you know, when we I think a lot of people, you know, when they think about the intellectual property, when they think about their ideas that they want, it's got to be exciting then for them to make that a reality, you know, fully bring it to market. And so do you mind sharing just a little bit about Sense IP? Like, what does engagement look like? Are you consulting with folks?

13:44Like, what does it look like to use Sense IP? And how is this better than working directly with an IP attorney that someone may have some experience with? Or I should ask that question of, like, who is this great for? Who might be better off just like, listen, you should probably just go old. school? Well, old school is nice, but it's dated. I mean, I would love to ride a buggy drawn by a horse. It's less effective than having a car, right? We look at our platform in a similar way. So we specifically appeal to the individuals, inventors, the early stage startups, they don't have the time, they don't have the resources to spend on a fancy old-school patent attorney.

14:34They need to move fast. They need not to wait with their IP process, because people tend to delay things, right? Hey, I don't have the time, I don't have the money, I'll keep running with my idea, and eventually I'll get some funding, and then I'll take attorney. No, that's wrong, because you might hit a wall, you might do yourself damages by infringing someone else's IP, and you don't know that, but hey, you waited too long and it's too late to change. If you do things right from the get-go, it's easier. So our goal is to make sure that you can do that, as I mentioned, in a matter of minutes.

15:07And it's very affordable, very affordable. So it's good for everyone. It's also good we start to see more and more companies use our platform as day zero of their product lifecycle. So they come up with an idea that they want to integrate into their product line before they start their R &D, spend a few minutes to analyze that and get the green light that you indeed have something unique and you do have the freedom to operate. With larger companies, of course, when you have also areas of litigations and actually going after competitors with your IP, that's definitely the lawyer's field. That's their domain.

15:53We are not trying to invade that. The ideation, building your portfolio, making the business decisions around your IP, this is what we excel at. And you work with enterprise-level companies as well. Yes. What does that look like? Well, our focus started with smaller and medium-sized companies. We don't go for the apples of the world just yet. But usually the engagement is to give our platform to the IT managers on one hand so that they can automate their handling of the IP platform. And for me, you know, for a few years, I was responsible for the IP portfolio of my business company. And it's hard because you don't have the tools to actually help you with a strategy or deal every day with the admin paper pushing of managing the portfolio.

16:50our platform ensures that you make some business sense of your IP. We have the correlation between how IP serves your business. And because we have that automatic correlation, you get some insights that helps you save a lot of money. For example, in annuities, the annual maintenance fees. For example, making better decisions of where to protect yourself and how. So IP managers, definitely that's a great solution. um uh product teams and also a lot of um vpr and these get are interested in our solutions to encourage innovation in their organization so every uh developer every product guy in the team have access to that platform the minute has idea just punch it in and then it is reviewed in the system scored and the managers can decide whether it has a business justification to move on to development.

17:45So it's really nice to enterprises as well. Yeah. Ophir, your website is senseip.ai. When somebody goes to your website, what would you recommend they do? I know you've got some great resources as well. I would encourage everyone to just try. We have in our public website, a public version of Leo, our chat agent, which will help you through, just share your idea in a highlight and it will help you with the, high-level assessment of potentability. If you're happy with that, it will guide you just to sign up. Again, free of charge so far. And then you can start drilling down with your idea and get more sense and protect it.

18:29So you can start. We wanted to make sure the platform is easy, self-serve, and everybody can start immediately, hop on and just enjoy the technology. Ophir Katsir is CEO and co-founder at SenseIP. on the web at senseip.ai. Ophir, thank you so much for joining us. Josh, thank you so much.

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