Patent search is a $1.2 billion industry, and it's broken. Market reports flag a shortage of skilled patent analysts as a top industry constraint, yet the analysts who do exist spend 70–80% of their time discarding irrelevant results. The tools haven't fundamentally changed in decades. They're designed for high recall and low precision: Boolean queries, bulk exports, and thousands of hits dumped into spreadsheets for manual review. That's time and money lost, and it's why we built Strata IP.
Tools that never evolved
Strata IP is a search tool designed by searchers. Our founding team has over five decades of combined industry experience and has handled several thousand search requests across invalidity, prior art, patentability, and freedom-to-operate. In that time, tools have evolved on the surface, but the core problem never got fixed. Precision was always poor, and the real analytical work always fell on the searcher, not the software. We didn't start with a generic "patent AI" product. We started with a question: what would the workflow look like if it were built for the person who actually runs these searches every day? Where are the biggest inefficiencies, and why has nobody solved them?
No more missing critical prior art
Today's tools rank results by keyword density, not technical relevance. Even when a strong reference surfaces near the top, the searcher still has to locate the relevant context buried inside the document. Titles and abstracts can be misleading. A patent might look irrelevant at first glance but contain the smoking gun deep in the claims or description. Searchers discard these references every day, and that's how critical prior art gets missed. We rebuilt the search process from the ground up using the latest AI models, which means retrieval isn't limited to keyword matching alone. The result is stronger context matching, better precision, and significantly improved accuracy over traditional search. Less noise, less Excel, and more time on the work that actually matters.
Work with us
If you're a small law firm running patent searches, a startup that needs a portfolio deep dive or freedom-to-operate analysis, or an individual researcher looking for better tools, we'd love to hear from you.