How Enevate uses Tradespace to drive market-aware licensing as a small team

An early pioneer in silicon-dominant lithium-ion batteries, Enevate develops and licenses battery technologies that accelerate the adoption of electric vehicles (EVs). Its IP portfolio of 650 assets spans more than a dozen technology categories to help the EV industry overcome adoption barriers like long charging times, driving range anxiety, price, and temperature performance.

Enevate’s legal affairs are led by General Counsel Noel Whitley. As a small company with a limited budget to file a few dozen patent applications a year, Enevate has to be “very smart” about how they prosecute their patents. It’s not just size that Noel’s team is up against either: as a technology provider and licensor, the stakes of Enevate’s IP work reach the entire company. Enevate doesn’t manufacture products, but rather relies on licensing to battery manufacturers like Customcells, NantG Power or JR Energy Solutions for revenue. Says Noel, “At the end of the day, our ability to make money hinges on having the right patent protection.”

To lead the EV battery market and drive successful monetization as a small team, efficiency is everything. As Noel explains, “We’re always looking for ways to improve efficiency and reduce costs while improving quality, both in terms of our patent filings and competitive insights.” Noel’s team can’t cut corners, however, in maintaining a lead on its fast-evolving market. Monitoring its rapid technological advancements and ever-shifting business conditions — and extracting actionable insights from what they see — is critical but challenging, and why Noel and his team were so excited about Tradespace.

Tradespace automatically learns a company’s technology categories and then lets its IP attorneys instantly explore competitors, portfolios, and patents according to those categories. This capability unlocks intelligence that otherwise might take weeks for attorneys to assemble on their own. Compared to legacy tools that map assets to categories using keywords, Tradespace’s insights are much richer. After all, they’re based on the entirety of the internet’s information and the company’s portfolio. Says Noel, “There’s a lot of tools that attempt to do this target mapping, but I’ve never gotten any meaningful results from their relational analyses. With a substantive AI-based model on the backend, it provides different, better, and usable insights.”

Noel not only believes in Tradespace for how it lets his team be smarter with patent prosecution, but also because of what improving patent quality will do for his portfolio over time: “With greater insight into how our IP fits into the technical landscape of the battery industry, Tradespace will help us fine tune our portfolio while reducing costs.” In addition to being impressed by the tool’s intuitive ease of use, he’s been equally impressed by the level of support he’s received from the Tradespace team. “Everyone has been fantastic in making this a true partnership that’s meaningful and productive. It’s a whole different experience than I’ve had working with various tools over the last 30 years.”