# RightHub raises $15m to upgrade the infrastructure for protecting innovation

• For the first time, IP owners and professionals are able to use a single platform to do everything they need to protect innovation and ideas. From evaluating ideas and filing applications, to renewing, enforcing and monetising the IP rights!
• Recent reports in the US and EU find industries that use Intellectual Property protection account for over 41% (44% in EU) of GDP and employ 33% of total workforce. In the US alone, IP accounts for over 50% of all US merchandise exports, resulting in almost $842 billion of revenue created 1) 2)
• RightHub has built the first ever collaborative platform for the management and enforcement of Intellectual Property (IP) rights aiming at bringing an order of magnitude efficiency improvement over the current tools and processes

**LONDON, United Kingdom (1st March, 2023)** – RightHub, the collaborative IP platform, has closed a seed round of $15m in an oversubscribed round led by London-based firstminute Capital and Switzerland-based Anker Capital with participation from Conviction VC and partners at various law firms as well as successful founders in various industries. RightHub focuses on heavily reducing the burden of manual labor, cost and risk involved in the process of obtaining, managing and enforcing Intellectual Property, while simultaneously bringing transparency and cost certainty to the end customer. The investment will be used to further develop the capabilities of the RightHub platform as well as scaling up the go-to-market team across multiple geographies.

1) [Intellectual Property and the U.S. economy: Third Edition](https://www.uspto.gov/ip-policy/economic-research/intellectual-property-and-us-economy)
2) [High Growth Firms and Intellectual Property Rights](https://documents.epo.org/projects/babylon/eponet.nsf/0/F59459A1E64B62F3C12583FC002FBD93/$FILE/high_growth_firms_study_en.pdf)
  
Innovation is the lifeblood of human progress. Every day, everywhere, there are incredible creators inspiring us all by crafting the future of humanity, the planet, and even the universe. To protect these amazing ideas and innovations, IP is a necessary system to reward the hard work and massive investments put in when building products, services, and brands. Sadly, the infrastructure that IP runs on currently does not bring justice to the innovation that flows through it. A huge amount of valuable time and cost in the IP process is taken up by manual, tedious, and cumbersome tasks, exchanging data across the world by emails or letters, and  updating records in point solution applications by endless manual data entries. All this friction is making innovators and IP professionals waste their time, talent, and skills. Significant portions of the IP budgets are being wasted on completely irrelevant activities and reliance on dated platforms and manual labor. RightHub is changing the daily life of creators seeking to protect their ideas and the IP professionals assisting them along the way.

RightHub has built a platform that connects forward-thinking creators and IP professionals everywhere bringing efficiency and peace of mind into the process of obtaining, managing, and enforcing IP. The outcome is a much more rewarding process for everyone involved. The result is more time spent on creating and innovating and less time spent on non-value-adding activities.

For IP owners, RightHub becomes their control center to evaluate innovations and brand ideas, file, renew, change ownership, watch, monitor and enforce everything IP. No switching between multiple products, exporting and importing data between various databases or communicating in risky and unwieldy ways. IP Professionals at law firms are now able to vastly increase efficiency within their IP practices while providing a modern, integrated experience to their clients and adding valuable services that generate new revenue streams with real tangible ROI for clients.

RightHub was founded in 2021 by a team of IP veterans with deep knowledge of the industry and each with over 20 years of experience from building and scaling software and services companies. The RightHub team has vastly complementary experiences ranging from R&D and patents to trademarks and online brand protection which, for the first time ever, brings together the best of all worlds when building an IP platform to solve the problems across all protection types and customer segments including IP owners, IP firms and general practice firms.

RightHub, the collaborative and inclusive platform, is already being used daily by forward-thinking creators and IP professionals in over 2,800 corporates and law firms to register, maintain and enforce IP. RightHub simplifies every aspect of the IP lifecycle and provides support along every step of the process with only a few clicks.

RightHub, with HQ in London, has a team of 75 people across its offices in the UK, US, Denmark, and Sweden. Half the team consists of IP experts while the other half consists of industry-leading technologists focusing on software development and data.

**Toni Nijm, CEO and Co-Founder of RightHub, says:**
>“It is the first time that a platform in our industry emerges with an equal emphasis on all IP types and workflows with a horizontal focus on removing the friction IP professionals experience in their daily practice. IP is, by definition, a network-based industry where communication and collaboration is a daily routine. However, the industry is still operating as if everything is done in isolation. We want to change all of that! I’m hugely excited by what we are building and the value we are creating for the industry. We are a very complementary team sharing the same vision and are determined to take on this big challenge with a world-class team of innovators, entrepreneurs, and IP experts.”

**Arek Wylegalski, Partner at firstminute Capital, comments:**
>“Spending our days searching for the best high-tech companies to support, we have been surprised to learn how little innovation the intellectual property industry itself has seen so far. In that way it is somewhat similar to venture capital - lots of small teams of highly skilled practitioners doing what they have been doing for decades with little change and not a lot of technology. It is a giant opportunity hiding in plain sight.
RightHub wants to put the customer back into the driver’s seat and to equip the IP professionals and industry IP teams with state of the art tools making them more effective in protecting IP globally.
The RightHub team consists of industry veterans who know this sector like no one else. Their vision for RightHub is incredibly exciting and they have the track record to back it up. It should not be this convoluted to protect innovations - and if RightHub succeeds, it will not be. We are proud to have co-led this investment together with Anker Capital.”
RightHub wants to put the customer back into the driver’s seat and to equip the IP professionals and industry IP teams with state of the art tools making them more effective in protecting IP globally.
The RightHub team consists of industry veterans who know this sector like no one else. Their vision for RightHub is incredibly exciting and they have the track record to back it up. It should not be this convoluted to protect innovations - and if RightHub succeeds, it will not be. We are proud to have co-led this investment together with Anker Capital.”

**Jonas Anker, Managing Partner at Anker Capital, comments:**


>“We invest in teams and ideas that have the intention and potential to transform an industry using technology as its core. IP is a fundamental cornerstone in our society but has seen very little innovation over the past century. Backing RightHub ticks all our boxes, and we are very excited to be on this journey with a world- class team to enable the creators of the future”
 
You can read more about RightHub and how we are changing the future of working with Intellectual Property at www.righthub.com.

For further information contact:

Toni Nijm, RightHub Limited

tnijm@righthub.com

Arek Wylegalski, firstminute Capital

arek@firstminute.capital

**Notes to editors**

### About RightHub

RightHub is a London-based company on a mission to upgrade the global infrastructure for protecting innovations. RightHub radically transforms the day-to-day experience of being an IP Professional. Rather than spending a significant amount of time dealing with non-value administrative tasks and jumping between multiple applications, IP Professionals are now able to manage their daily work activities in one single platform that connects them to partners around the globe while integrating relevant data and services into each context and process of the IP lifecycle.

While existing products and services on the market offer a fragmented and disjointed user experience also leading to unpredictable spend both in time and money, RightHub’s horizontal platform is providing both IP owners and IP firms a modern and transparent way of consuming and paying for IP software and services.

Website: www.righthub.com

### About firstminute capital

firstminute Capital is a $315m AUM venture fund, investing in seed stage tech companies. firstminute is sector agnostic and invests across the UK, Europe and the US. Backed by over 120 unicorn founders and founded by Brent Hoberman (founder of lastminute.com, made.com, Founders Forum) and Spencer Crawley (Goldman Sachs, DMC Partners) in 2017, firstminute has invested in over 100 companies.

https://www.firstminute.capital

### About Anker Capital

Anker Capital is a Swiss investment and corporate finance firm investing in platform companies that have the potential to disrupt the global vertical they operate in. Anker Capital has backed companies in LegalTech, MusicTech, 3D printing and Computer Vision and AI.

https://www.anker-capital.ch

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Finally...

### An interview with Simon Lotze at Aera Law Firm 
 
Building a business case is a critical element in career progression and central to that business case is the additional revenue that you can bring to the table. [Tom Nener from Pinsent Masons gave some advice](https://www.righthub.com/insights/do-todays-attorneys) to lawyers looking to sharpen their sales skills in the IP world and central to that point is the kind of service that you can offer to clients as well as the role of IP management systems in transforming the level of service that you can provide. 
 
#### But what does that really mean? What are the core features and tools that allow you to make those changes? And how does the client experience change as a result? 

That is something that can look a little different for each lawyer and firm that implements process changes as scale throughout the organization and so we wanted to talk to an IP lawyer to see how their process and service level they offer has changed as a result of using RightHub. Simon Lotze from Aera law firm in Denmark had some answers! 
 
"Starting at the beginning of what RightHub offers young (or semi-young!) lawyers, one of the most important things it gives you is an overview. Because of the way that IP rights are managed, different portfolios and individual rights are often kind of melded together in your head - mixed up if you will. Right Hub gives you a way to get constant updated overviews of everything. And once you have worked with it for a little while, you will start to think in the way the platform shows you that things are. 
 
In a way, it gives you a sort of memory palace that allows you to keep up to date with everything that is happening as it is happening. If a client would ask "How is Trademark A doing?", you are able to answer that question so much more easily and in detail than you would otherwise. That is certainly the greatest thing that I have taken from it from a client/attorney perspective. 
 
Whenever I am on a call with a client or sitting in a meeting and they say, "we had that design, do you remember?" and I can say "yes, we registered that in January 2021 and in these countries". It works as a sort of catalyst for your memory. 
 
So often, IP rights are managed on glorified excel sheets and your memory cannot really remember an entire excel sheet line by line but when you have a complete overview of the portfolio which is easy to filter and easy to sort and you are looking at that overview every time you are doing work for that client then that is very different. Of course, I cannot remember 2,000 IP rights all at once, but I will always have a very good idea of what is happening when I am talking to the clients. 
 
And that is something that clients value very highly. They will often ask me "how do you remember where we had this mark or what happened with it?" and for me that comes from working with the RightHub platform and the different way that you are engaging with the portfolio and the data - from seeing the visual input every time you look it up. It jump starts my memory. And of course, not only do clients love to have that kind of service but it saves a lot of time for me too!" 
 
To see how RightHub creates visual overviews of portfolios and data that are easy and quick to understand (and remember!), get in touch [here](https://www.righthub.com/contact?expertise=Patent,Trademark,Design) and one of our expert team will be delighted to show you how you can begin to transform the service level that you can offer your clients! 

Can new IP Management tools help IP attorney progress their careers?

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