“I started Patsnap because I couldn't find prior art for my own invention.”

Jeffrey was a biomedical engineering student at NUS when he had what he thought was an original product idea. He spent weeks building a prototype before discovering, late in the process, that someone in Germany had patented something almost identical six years earlier. The lesson stuck.

“The patent system is supposed to make innovation public,” he says now, “but actually finding what’s already been invented is brutal. I figured if it was hard for me, it was hard for everyone.” That observation became the seed of Patsnap.

In 2007, Jeffrey spent a year overseas through NUS Overseas Colleges, interning at a startup in the Bay Area while taking entrepreneurship coursework at Stanford. The exposure mattered, but what mattered more were the conversations.

By the end of that year, Jeffrey had a co-founder, a rough prototype, and a decision: come back to Singapore and start the company there.

Patsnap launched in 2007 from a small office in Singapore. The first product was a simple patent search engine. The first customers were Singapore SMEs trying to figure out if their products infringed on existing patents — the same problem Jeffrey had run into as a student.

Growth was slow for the first three years. Then a customer in China bought a license, then five more, then a hundred. By 2012, Patsnap was operating across Singapore, China, and the UK.

The Series A in 2014 was led by XYZ. The Series E in 2021, valuing the company at over S$1 billion, included Tencent and SoftBank Vision Fund. By then, Patsnap had become the IP analytics layer underneath much of the AI-pharma and deeptech ecosystem.

Today, Patsnap is one of the few Singapore-founded software companies to have crossed S$100M+ in annual revenue.

By the end of that year, Jeffrey had a co-founder, a rough prototype, and a decision: come back to Singapore and start the company there.