Investment stage

It takes just one bright idea to start a business. Seed stage companies have the highest number of patent filings, illustrating their crucial role in the transition to bigger and better things.

Buyout stage companies are hotbeds of innovation, always on the look-out for new ideas and products that can connect with both existing and new customers. Their scale makes them creative engines and ideas factories, developing new products and services, whose brands and logos can be trade marked.

Figure 7 shows the companies having filed for intellectual property rights, split by their investment stage. The distribution is homogenously distributed across all investment stages, with the seed stage exhibiting the highest percentage of companies filing for patents, and the buyout stage having the highest percentage of companies filing for trade marks. Interestingly, the replacement capital stage showed the highest percentage of companies having filed for at least one patent and one trade mark. Investors targeting replacement capital and buyout stages may find substantial opportunities in companies with comprehensive IPR strategies, indicating strong potential for business growth and market expansion.

Key statistics

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14%

seed stage PE/VC–backed companies have filed for at least 1 patent between 2007 and the first half of 2023

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26%

buyout stage PE/VC–backed companies have filed for at least 1 trade mark between 2007 and the first half of 2023

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2.95

trade mark applications for the average PE/VC–backed replacement capital stage company between 2007 and the first half of 2023

 

Figure 7: Number of companies and Share of companies filing for IP rights, by investment stage

 
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Note: Total number of EU27 companies in the sample is 56,042 between 2007 and the first half of 2023. The chart above represents the number of companies filing for IP rights per investment stage, and then the share of companies having at least one patent filing, trade mark filing, or both.

 

As represented in Figure 8, replacement capital and buyout are the investment stages with companies having the highest number of filings both in terms of patents and trade marks. This difference in IPR activity across investment stages may be related to the age of the companies; later stages of investment typically target more mature firms that have more developed products and a more mature IPR strategy, resulting in a higher number of IPRs overall.

 

Figure 8: Average IPR filings per company, by investment stage

 
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Note: Total number of EU27 companies in the sample is 56,042 between 2007 and the first half of 2023. The chart above represents the average number of IPR filings per company, by the investment stage of the company.