RightHub raises $15m to upgrade the infrastructure for protecting innovation
• For the first time, IP owners and professionals are able to use a single platform to do everything they need to protect innovation and ideas. From evaluating ideas and filing applications, to renewing, enforcing and monetising the IP rights!
• Recent reports in the US and EU find industries that use Intellectual Property protection account for over 41% (44% in EU) of GDP and employ 33% of total workforce. In the US alone, IP accounts for over 50% of all US merchandise exports, resulting in almost $842 billion of revenue created 1) 2)
• RightHub has built the first ever collaborative platform for the management and enforcement of Intellectual Property (IP) rights aiming at bringing an order of magnitude efficiency improvement over the current tools and processes
LONDON, United Kingdom (1st March, 2023) – RightHub, the collaborative IP platform, has closed a seed round of $15m in an oversubscribed round led by London-based firstminute Capital and Switzerland-based Anker Capital with participation from Conviction VC and partners at various law firms as well as successful founders in various industries. RightHub focuses on heavily reducing the burden of manual labor, cost and risk involved in the process of obtaining, managing and enforcing Intellectual Property, while simultaneously bringing transparency and cost certainty to the end customer. The investment will be used to further develop the capabilities of the RightHub platform as well as scaling up the go-to-market team across multiple geographies.
- Intellectual Property and the U.S. economy: Third Edition
- High Growth Firms and Intellectual Property Rights
Innovation is the lifeblood of human progress. Every day, everywhere, there are incredible creators inspiring us all by crafting the future of humanity, the planet, and even the universe. To protect these amazing ideas and innovations, IP is a necessary system to reward the hard work and massive investments put in when building products, services, and brands. Sadly, the infrastructure that IP runs on currently does not bring justice to the innovation that flows through it. A huge amount of valuable time and cost in the IP process is taken up by manual, tedious, and cumbersome tasks, exchanging data across the world by emails or letters, and updating records in point solution applications by endless manual data entries. All this friction is making innovators and IP professionals waste their time, talent, and skills. Significant portions of the IP budgets are being wasted on completely irrelevant activities and reliance on dated platforms and manual labor. RightHub is changing the daily life of creators seeking to protect their ideas and the IP professionals assisting them along the way.
RightHub has built a platform that connects forward-thinking creators and IP professionals everywhere bringing efficiency and peace of mind into the process of obtaining, managing, and enforcing IP. The outcome is a much more rewarding process for everyone involved. The result is more time spent on creating and innovating and less time spent on non-value-adding activities.
For IP owners, RightHub becomes their control center to evaluate innovations and brand ideas, file, renew, change ownership, watch, monitor and enforce everything IP. No switching between multiple products, exporting and importing data between various databases or communicating in risky and unwieldy ways. IP Professionals at law firms are now able to vastly increase efficiency within their IP practices while providing a modern, integrated experience to their clients and adding valuable services that generate new revenue streams with real tangible ROI for clients.
RightHub was founded in 2021 by a team of IP veterans with deep knowledge of the industry and each with over 20 years of experience from building and scaling software and services companies. The RightHub team has vastly complementary experiences ranging from R&D and patents to trademarks and online brand protection which, for the first time ever, brings together the best of all worlds when building an IP platform to solve the problems across all protection types and customer segments including IP owners, IP firms and general practice firms.
RightHub, the collaborative and inclusive platform, is already being used daily by forward-thinking creators and IP professionals in over 2,800 corporates and law firms to register, maintain and enforce IP. RightHub simplifies every aspect of the IP lifecycle and provides support along every step of the process with only a few clicks.
RightHub, with HQ in London, has a team of 75 people across its offices in the UK, US, Denmark, and Sweden. Half the team consists of IP experts while the other half consists of industry-leading technologists focusing on software development and data.
Toni Nijm, CEO and Co-Founder of RightHub, says:
“It is the first time that a platform in our industry emerges with an equal emphasis on all IP types and workflows with a horizontal focus on removing the friction IP professionals experience in their daily practice. IP is, by definition, a network-based industry where communication and collaboration is a daily routine. However, the industry is still operating as if everything is done in isolation. We want to change all of that! I’m hugely excited by what we are building and the value we are creating for the industry. We are a very complementary team sharing the same vision and are determined to take on this big challenge with a world-class team of innovators, entrepreneurs, and IP experts.”
Arek Wylegalski, Partner at firstminute Capital, comments:
“Spending our days searching for the best high-tech companies to support, we have been surprised to learn how little innovation the intellectual property industry itself has seen so far. In that way it is somewhat similar to venture capital - lots of small teams of highly skilled practitioners doing what they have been doing for decades with little change and not a lot of technology. It is a giant opportunity hiding in plain sight. RightHub wants to put the customer back into the driver’s seat and to equip the IP professionals and industry IP teams with state of the art tools making them more effective in protecting IP globally. The RightHub team consists of industry veterans who know this sector like no one else. Their vision for RightHub is incredibly exciting and they have the track record to back it up. It should not be this convoluted to protect innovations - and if RightHub succeeds, it will not be. We are proud to have co-led this investment together with Anker Capital.” RightHub wants to put the customer back into the driver’s seat and to equip the IP professionals and industry IP teams with state of the art tools making them more effective in protecting IP globally. The RightHub team consists of industry veterans who know this sector like no one else. Their vision for RightHub is incredibly exciting and they have the track record to back it up. It should not be this convoluted to protect innovations - and if RightHub succeeds, it will not be. We are proud to have co-led this investment together with Anker Capital.”
Jonas Anker, Managing Partner at Anker Capital, comments:
“We invest in teams and ideas that have the intention and potential to transform an industry using technology as its core. IP is a fundamental cornerstone in our society but has seen very little innovation over the past century. Backing RightHub ticks all our boxes, and we are very excited to be on this journey with a world- class team to enable the creators of the future”
You can read more about RightHub and how we are changing the future of working with Intellectual Property at www.righthub.com.
For further information contact:
Toni Nijm, RightHub Limited
Arek Wylegalski, firstminute Capital
Notes to editors
About RightHub
RightHub is a London-based company on a mission to upgrade the global infrastructure for protecting innovations. RightHub radically transforms the day-to-day experience of being an IP Professional. Rather than spending a significant amount of time dealing with non-value administrative tasks and jumping between multiple applications, IP Professionals are now able to manage their daily work activities in one single platform that connects them to partners around the globe while integrating relevant data and services into each context and process of the IP lifecycle.
While existing products and services on the market offer a fragmented and disjointed user experience also leading to unpredictable spend both in time and money, RightHub’s horizontal platform is providing both IP owners and IP firms a modern and transparent way of consuming and paying for IP software and services.
Website: www.righthub.com
About firstminute capital
firstminute Capital is a $315m AUM venture fund, investing in seed stage tech companies. firstminute is sector agnostic and invests across the UK, Europe and the US. Backed by over 120 unicorn founders and founded by Brent Hoberman (founder of lastminute.com, made.com, Founders Forum) and Spencer Crawley (Goldman Sachs, DMC Partners) in 2017, firstminute has invested in over 100 companies.
About Anker Capital
Anker Capital is a Swiss investment and corporate finance firm investing in platform companies that have the potential to disrupt the global vertical they operate in. Anker Capital has backed companies in LegalTech, MusicTech, 3D printing and Computer Vision and AI.