Garden announces $6.8m seed fundraise

We are hiring.

Today, Justin Mack and I are excited to announce Garden’s seed fundraise of $6.8m, led by Natalie Sandman at Spark Capital, with participation from Brian Murray at Craft Ventures, Jamie Quint at Uncommon Capital, Zachary Perret at Mischief, and a handful of highly impactful angels such as former FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski ; Earthlink founder Sky Dayton (our first investor); PayPal co-founder Ken Howery; Wayfair General Counsel Enrique Colbert ; Craft Ventures co-founder Bill Lee; Susa Ventures founder Chad Byers ; Renaissance Technologies co-founder and B Capital Chairman Howard Morgan , among others. We are grateful for our customers, partners, and investors for helping us get started.?

Our mission is simple: we want to accelerate global R&D by helping our customers understand the patent landscape better.?

My parents run a small business in Arizona that was hit with a patent infringement notice. Through their process, I quickly learned about the abusive patent practices deployed by bad actors. As I spoke to hundreds of stakeholders across practitioners, inventors, and examiners, a common frustration among them was the painstaking process of conducting meaningful patent searches.

Patent search in its current form is a keyword based system. This works well when inventions are well categorized and claim language is discrete. However, this method has degraded as the variety of invention material exploded. With transformer-based models like GPT-3 trained on a lot of data, our hypothesis was higher fidelity embeddings along with LLMs acting as reasoning agents could improve results.?

Our initial prototype was a Jupyter notebook with a basic patent search index, and the early results were promising. However, the more time we spent understanding the intricacies of ranking and reranking results, it became clear we needed sophistication beyond simple semantics. We rebuilt our index that combined the metadata of patents along with a proprietary breakdown of claims, the specification of a patent, and unique enrichment of figure data. Combined with improving LLM reasoning capabilities, we built workflows that could be leveraged for a variety of tasks, starting with prior art searches for litigation use cases, which exploded in demand.?

Our ambition starts here. Patents are powerful because they allow innovators to confidently make long-term bets on breakthrough endeavors. However, when the system is abused, it leads to frustrating outcomes for folks like my parents. We believe that better, privacy-first tooling is the first step to solving for this.?

Our primary focus is on software and life sciences. Software is interesting because abusive actors have created a litigious playing field around enforcing old patents on both startups and large enterprises. Our product Patentbreaker, a 102/103 prior art search and claims chart generation tool, has already been pretty powerful in this domain. Life sciences is separately interesting because of how company value formation and creation primarily occurs through deep IP moats. We have invested a lot of resources in enriching life sciences patent data and unique algorithms to traverse through the life sciences landscape. We will share many of these updates later this year.?

In the backdrop of the Garden story, generative AI has led to substantial cost advantages for R&D. We want to equip forward thinking practitioners and organizations with the best tooling around it. Currently, the discourse around AI and IP has been around copyrights and trademarks (rightfully so, as in the early innings of training these models, it’s become a contentious issue). With cheaper inference, we expect patents to be squarely center in this conversation.?

Our funding round allows us to hire brilliant people and hit our milestones. The tooling for our industry has been neglected. We are proud to be an American company building for our customers who solve complex problems for society. We have already been awestruck by the problems our customers are solving for the world, and it is an honor to serve them. We look forward to partnering with and serving more innovators and disruptors across different fields over the coming years.?

Now, back to work.

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If our work excites you, we are hiring. Please apply here.