36 Kr reported that PatSnap announced the completion of a US$300 million Series E financing. This round of financing was led by Tencent Investment and SoftBank Fund Phase II, with CPE co-investing, Sequoia China, Shunwei Capital and Xiangfeng Investment, etc. Old shareholders continue to bless, and Index Capital serves as the exclusive financial advisor.
"PatSnap" has been focusing on intellectual property and technological innovation services since its establishment more than 10 years ago. In the view of the founder Zhang Jihui, the foreign intellectual property information service industry has matured. The US company Clarivate Analytics, known as the "PatSnap", was targeted. In most of the early days, no one in China discovered patents. Now China's R&D is the second in the world. From the perspective of development, or from the perspective of the country's promotion from the top, "innovation" has become a very important strategic content. At present, the scale of innovation management software developed globally exceeds 100 billion U.S. dollars.
Companies also go through different stages through market changes.
From 2007 to 2013, the "PatSnap" were mainly in the education market, and at the same time looking for the product and market fit, the company is still accumulating data and polishing products. In July 2013, after the market and product fit point were gradually found, in the end-to-end service of joint informatization, from 2013 to 2018, "PatSnap" quickly built a sales team and carried out large-scale replication of the market. It is reported that the growth during this period has remained above 100% every year. After 2018, "PatSnap" began to explore the second curve. The background is that "PatSnap" discovered that only patent information cannot meet the needs of enterprises for R&D and innovation decision-making. The new demand is that they need business intelligence in the field of technological innovation. For example, car companies may need to know the news of other manufacturers about automobile R&D, even cross-border innovation news from Apple, Xiaomi, etc.
