How Enveda Biosciences is building a modern, tech-enabled IP practice with Tradespace

Enveda Biosciences is a Series B startup that uses AI to characterize unknown molecules from nature and turn them into medicines.

Enveda is always striving to do more with less, and its Senior Vice President of Legal Jason Tejani sees this culture as an opportunity to build a modern IP practice that can execute as fast as the rest of the organization. Given Enveda’s expertise in machine learning, it’s no surprise that Jason knows what good AI tools look like — and what they can do to transform the quality and output of a modern IP practice.

The benefits that initially drew Jason to Tradespace

Always on the lookout for ways to get an advantage, Jason was immediately curious about Tradespace after speaking on a high-growth IP panel moderated by Tradespace’s CEO, Alec Sorensen. As he learned more, he was particularly excited about Tradespace’s potential to address two opportunities at Enveda.

1. Capturing intellectual property: Preserving his IP team’s ability to capture every invention that comes out of the R&D team, which not only encompasses the chemistry and biology around drug discovery and development, but also machine learning, robotics and software engineering. Thus far, the team had managed full coverage manually by creating a culture of disclosure that got scientists excited to share their innovations. But if Enveda was going to keep growing at the rate it was, manual collection wouldn’t last, especially if scientists needed to be able to stay focused on their core tasks.

2. Harmonizing legal and corporate strategies: Enveda’s legal team ties every decision they make to corporate strategy, something else Jason wants to maintain as the company grows. But for the business and legal teams to move together like they do, they need to be closely connected. This degree of connectivity means the IP team needs to gather and make sense of a lot of detailed information. For example, how each disclosure and patent maps to Enveda’s product lines. Traditionally, IP teams have relied on hiring paralegals for this type of data entry, but Jason knew that Tradespace could keep the team lean, creative, and focused on strategy more than the data entry.

Experiencing Tradespace’s “game-changing” capabilities firsthand through a pilot

After confirming that Tradespace precludes public disclosure, complies with SOC 2 with its robust data privacy and security practices, and has all of the functionality legacy IP management systems do, Enveda began a pilot to experience Tradespace firsthand. With a quick and easy export from its old system and a 30-minute import process supported by Tradespace’s customer success team, Enveda could start using the platform.

As soon as Jason logged in and saw the capabilities Tradespace offered around Enveda’s published IP, it clicked for him: Tradespace was the powerful backbone he’d been imagining for his modern IP team. There, he could see simple descriptions of his IP organized by business category, his tasks for the day, and upcoming deadlines — all in one place, a view Jason describes as “game changing.” Putting his entire team on the platform would help them easily keep information flowing from invention all the way to revenue, and would quickly orient them on all their different tasks day to day.

Diving deeper, Jason appreciated the quantitative insights available to him and was surprised to see that in some cases, Tradespace had more granular data on Enveda’s IP than they did, such as their most recent correspondence with the patent office on that asset. Not soon after the pilot, Enveda upgraded to a full Tradespace subscription.

Transforming invention disclosure, evaluation, and operations strategy as a full customer

Even though Enveda is still early in its use of Tradespace, it’s already started fulfilling the potential Jason originally saw in it. Instead of collecting disclosures manually, his team now uses Tradespace to automatically turn long, complex scientific artifacts from his researchers into formatted materials they can understand. As a result, they’re able to focus on doing deeper evaluations — collecting the right follow-up information, thinking about additional use cases, and better assessing patentability, which Tradespace assists them with as well.

On the operations front, Jason just hired a new member to the IP team who will be using Tradespace as their central command instead of solely relying on outside counsel and administrative support. “Tradespace fills a large gap in our legaltech stack,” says Jason, “and we’re confident that it’ll not only support, but accelerate, our ability to scale.”