PitchBook Analyst Note: Introducing PitchBook Patent Research

When scrying a startup’s future, try looking at patents

To measure a fledgling company’s success, investors and other observers look at revenue and growth, but clever ideas—the startup’s intellectual property—and the ways they’re protected can also be a key predictor of what comes next. 

Startups with patents and patent applications in progress raise larger VC rounds on average. They also raise capital at much higher valuations than startups without such protection on their ideas, especially when it comes to angel investors, and achieve higher exit values down the line. 

That’s according to PitchBook’s latest analyst note, which introduces our growing patent data collection and takes a quantitative approach to detailing how patents impact startups.