Score your IP moat the way a Series B investor would.
Your company's patent moat scorecard benchmarks your patent portfolio against typical venture-stage IP profiles across five dimensions. Receive a personalized scorecard to assess your company's current IP status and get a checklist of next moves.
Key Products: Product A Product B Product C
- Tie filing allocation to the next two product milestones.
- Refresh freedom-to-operate coverage before enterprise rollout.
- Convert recurring technical decisions into an invention capture rhythm.
The five questions investors actually care about.
Sophisticated acquirers and Series B leads do not ask whether you have patents. They ask whether the IP supports the financing story, the product roadmap, and the exit. Each dimension here is scored 0–9 against observed venture-stage benchmarks.
Invention capture
Rhythm of disclosure before public release. Inventor education. Filing cadence tied to milestones.
Patent vs. trade secret allocation
Documented decision criteria, trade-secret hygiene, and claim-breadth strategy.
Freedom to operate
Formal FTO posture, competitive monitoring, and engineering's ability to design around.
Claim-to-product alignment
Coverage of revenue-generating features, active claim mapping, and continuation strategy.
Exit-horizon fit
Diligence readiness, international strategy, and treatment of adjacent IP assets.
Founder mode or investor mode.
Same scoring engine. Different framing. Founders see actions they can take. Investors see diligence questions to raise with management. One tool, two contexts.
If you run portfolio companies, running the scorecard in investor mode produces a structured briefing you can share with founders before your next board meeting. Three taps. No login.
- File continuations covering your three core product modules
- Update claim charts before next investor update
- Document trade-secret inventory and access controls
Where does your score land?
Tier benchmarks reflect observed IP profiles at typical Series A and Series B financings and at recent strategic exits in deep tech and AI. Your score includes a written explanation of the tier and the gap to the next.
Jeff Schell
Jeff Schell is Managing Partner of Whiteford's Mountain West practice and an AI legal advisor to technology companies. A patent attorney and venture capitalist, he advises founders and investors on patent strategy, IP diligence, and venture growth. Since 2012, his work has supported the creation of over $100 million in transaction and enterprise value across Colorado's technology ecosystem.