The importance of IP when building the primary interface for the metaverse .

To mark World IP Day 2022, Jeremy Holmes, Head of IP, IP Group discusses portfolio company Ultraleap's IP strategy with Ultraleap CEO & Founder Tom Carter.

The term ‘metaverse’ has been hard to miss over the last few months but it’s not new to IP Group’s portfolio company Ultraleap. Since their founding in 2013, their mission has been to remove boundaries between physical and digital worlds. Their IP strength demonstrates the leadership they have in achieving this. IP Group has been with the company since the very beginning, participating in their four funding rounds, the latest being a £60 million Series D raise. Ahead of World IP Day, Jeremy Holmes, Head of IP at IP Group, sat down with Ultraleap CEO and Founder Tom Carter to find out more about their IP strategy and why it’s so important to the company.

Jeremy: Can you tell us a bit about Ultraleap and your current IP portfolio?

Tom: Ultraleap is one of the leading IP owners in spatial computing and natural user interface technology. Our rapidly growing IP portfolio includes over 420 patents. Our two core technologies are hand tracking, where we have a comprehensive IP moat, and mid-air haptics where we are the only commercially available solution in the world. We enable our customers to use these technologies in three core verticals – XR, Out of Home and Automotive – across a range of use cases. Our IP strength is based on over 10 years of research and development of hand tracking, mid-air haptics, and related fields, powered by hundreds of millions of dollars of investment. We are proud of both the number of patents we hold that demonstrate our restless innovation, but also the quality of the patents. Over 75% of our patents have strong to very strong blocking components. Our IP strategy very much focuses on both volume and quality. In fact, in all our funding rounds, our IP moat has consistently been flagged as a strength.

Jeremy: What is your IP strategy and how has it changed over the years?

Tom: Our strategy centres around building a culture of innovation and ensuring that we are effective at capturing inventions as and when they happen. Our aim is to build a core of the most valuable patents that provide the broadest protection, filing these in over thirty territories around the world. We then build a thicket of more targeted patents which are filed in fewer territories based on the market they apply to or the level of protection they afford. We file quickly to secure early priority dates, and we value quality over quantity, preferring to allocate more budget to the most powerful patents rather than building a portfolio for vanity metrics. We also only file a patent if we believe it is possible to detect infringement and if the benefit of patent protection outweighs making the invention public. This means we have a significant knowledgebase of trade secrets in addition to our patents.

Over the years the focus on maintenance of existing inventions has increased but the strategy has remained the same. The acquisition of Leap Motion doubled our portfolio size but fitted in well with our existing approach. Supported by multiple global IP and patent experts, we offer our customers both robust patent coverage based on rigorous analysis of the strength and value of individual innovations, and access to proprietary knowledge. Our portfolio is regularly reviewed both internally and through our IP and patent partners, and our roadmap set out 12 months ahead of time. This year we expect to invest over £1 million in our IP portfolio, extending our lead in this area and strengthening our IP moat even further.

Jeremy: Why is having such a comprehensive IP strategy important to you?

Tom: From the very beginning we knew we had something special that we had to protect, and we had great advisers like IP Group to give us advice on the best way of doing this. At the start of building this company, our IP strength was about protecting the company and ensuring our success. Now, our IP strength gives our employees incentivisation, our customers confidence in the technology they are adding to their own products and our investors reassurance that they made the right investment.

Jeremy: How does Ultraleap monetise its IP?

Tom: Our innovation in this area has resulted in us being the leader in hand tracking and mid-air haptics technologies. We licence our technologies to key industry players via scalable B2B software focussed solutions. We’re regularly reported as being the best available hand tracking solution by journalists, analysts and blue-chip organisations. Companies like Qualcomm, Pico, Varjo and PepsiCo have bought and licenced our technology to bring natural interaction to their own products.

Our IP strategy to date means that we hold key patents for creating mid-air haptics. That means not only do we have world-leading technologies, but anyone looking to create a similar product in this space would require a licence from us to open any commercial opportunities, in key geographies and in any market. The likes of Lego, DS Automobiles and Warner Brothers have bought and licenced our mid-air haptic technology.

Jeremy: How does Ultraleap foster IP innovation at the company?

Tom: One of our company values is ‘Restless Innovators’. Creativity and invention are key to our success, and we encourage everyone to look for novel solutions that give us the competitive edge. We foster that in formal ways like our Intellectual Property Incentive Scheme, to more casual ways like regular company wide ‘Show and Tell’ days or tech talks.