Robert Ambrogi BlogElevator Pitch: Prokurio makes it radically easier for businesses to take control of their intellectual property spending. Our SaaS platform helps companies uncover and eliminate hundreds of thousands of dollars in excessive IP costs and automates complex and time-consuming financial planning and budgeting processes.
What makes you unique or innovative? We’re the first vendor to create a platform focused on the financial needs of corporate IP teams. To do this, we’ve integrated important features usually only found in IP Management, E-billing, and Financial Planning and Analysis applications. This allows us to deliver several innovative IP-focused financial features, including a graphical budget simulator and the industry’s only automated IP maintenance invoice review solution.
What problem do you solve? Our solution significantly decreases the number of tools and time needed to develop and manage IP budgets. We also provide advanced financial modeling tools to make it possible to explore a range of “what-if” scenarios as the financial year progresses, enabling IP groups to respond more quickly to changing conditions. Finally, Prokurio automatically audits maintenance invoices for inflated currency costs, above-market agent fees, and excessive country charges, frequently enabling companies to trim IP maintenance costs by ten percent or more.
Your competitors? Quantify IP (now owned by Anaqua) provides a highly regarded cost estimation tool that is being offered as an extension of their IP Management platform. While excellent at what it does, its strength lies in generating spreadsheets with IP cost estimates for one-off filing scenarios of individual patents.
Outside of the intellectual property space, several Enterprise Legal Management (ELM) solutions on the market, like Mitratech, SimpleLegal, Legal Tracker, etc., provide budgeting, E-billing, and matter management. These solutions work well for general legal billing but lack the country laws, fees, and IP Management capabilities needed to create flexible financial plans and manage budgets for IP teams.
Additionally, while many of these companies have invoice review capabilities, the lack of IP-specific laws and fees makes it impossible for them to extract and identify cost anomalies within IP maintenance invoices.
Demo video: http://bit.ly/3Xo9MwW
Founded: 1/19/2022, Michigan
Target customer. Corporate IP leadership, Senior IP Attorneys, IP Portfolio Managers
Price.
- Annuity/Renewal Watch Automated Invoice Review: Free.
- Annuity/Renewal Watch Plus Cost Management Program: 30% of Savings.
- Corporate Edition (Annuity/Renewal Watch, Planning, Budgeting): 24k per year.
- Enterprise Edition (Corporate Edition Plus Benchmarking, Additional Hosting, Support, and Configuration Options ): 48k per year.
Expected 2022/2023 gross revenue? Less than $1M/$1M – $5M
Number of users/paying customers? < 100/< 20
Traction to date. Ten organizations participated in the early access program for our patent invoice review service, Annuity Watch. To date, this service has analyzed more than fifteen million dollars of annuity invoices and identified more than 2 million dollars in excess foreign currency and agent billings. We have five trademark organizations committed to our early access program for Renewal Watch, which kicks off later in January. Finally, we have ten signups for early access to our budgeting and planning tools which will be launching in February – we anticipate twenty organizations will participate in that program.
Plan for growth over next five years. Our primary focus in the short term isn’t growth but relentless execution against our roadmap to deliver software that directly impacts our customer’s workloads and costs. We have a great set of early adopters and an excellent network of connections, but legal is slow to adopt anything new, and we are a new vendor with a new type of solution, so we do realize that we can’t just develop software and hope to grow.
To overcome obscurity and spur activity, we will execute a substantial awareness-building campaign throughout 2023, leveraging everything from social media to white papers, blog posts, podcasts, and videos to educate the industry on IP financials, provide cost-saving insights and position us as thought leaders. 2024 and beyond will see more of the same, albeit with a widening of our target audience as our product roadmap takes us into Outside Counsel management and, ultimately, a solution for law firms that enables them to collaborate with their clients on forecasts and IP budgets.
We strongly believe that with swift & strong execution of the platform and attention to feedback and details, growth will come organically over the coming year and beyond.”
Outside funding. Less than $1M in outside funding.
Describe any ways in which your company is diverse or promotes diversity. We’re a small company and rely on a global mixture of employee and contract employees. Our success in this culturally diverse environment begins by treating everyone equally with dignity and respect.
We are all part of the same team, and each of us brings our unique talents and cultural insights to bear as best we can. There is no US team versus offshore team or employee versus contractor, everyone is part of the Prokurio team, and we do as much as possible to level the playing field.