Solve Intelligence Raises $12 Million Backed by Microsoft and Thomson Reuters

Solve Intelligence didn’t enter the legal tech scene with flashy marketing or a crowded sales team—in fact, it had neither. But two years after its launch in 2023, the Delaware-based startup has closed a $12 million Series A round led by 20VC, with strategic investment from Microsoft and Thomson Reuters, and participation from existing backer Y Combinator. The funding marks a critical moment for a company that claims to have built the most trusted AI product in the patent law market, growing entirely through word of mouth.

Co-founder and CEO Chris Parsonson said the company is now profitable, with “millions of dollars in ARR,” a customer base growing at 25% month-over-month, and zero losses in head-to-head evaluations against competitors. Solve Intelligence is currently used by more than 200 IP teams across the U.S., Europe, and Asia, including clients like Siemens, Avery Dennison, DLA Piper, and Finnegan.

“We now have millions of dollars in ARR, our revenue has been growing ~25% month-on-month since our launch, and we’ve hired a team of world-class patent attorneys, AI researchers, and software engineers,” Parsonson told TechCrunch. He also noted the company had more money in the bank before this raise than the $3 million seed round it raised at inception. With no dedicated salesforce, Solve’s growth has been driven entirely by product traction.

The product itself is a browser-based editor designed for patent professionals, capable of assisting with everything from drafting patent applications and office action responses to invention harvesting and claim chart generation. Unlike generic AI writing tools, it adapts to an individual attorney’s drafting style and allows switching styles across jurisdictions, clients, and technology fields. “Every patent attorney has a different style,” Parsonson said. “The most popular feature of our product is the ability to customize the AI to a user’s own unique style.”

Chief Research Officer Sanj Ahilan framed the company’s emergence as a response to recent technological progress. “Eighteen months ago, it wasn’t possible to build software for patent workflows. Now it is,” Ahilan said. “We have built evaluations and algorithms to bridge the gap between the output from off-the-shelf AI models such as ChatGPT and professional-grade legal content.”

Solve’s engineering team is focused on more than speed—they hire what they call the “top 0.01%” of engineers, patent attorneys, and researchers. The Series A will be used to scale up this elite hiring effort, open a New York office, and expand R&D across core areas and new verticals. Parsonson said: “We’re already working with some of the largest pharmaceutical companies and top law firms in the World to expand our patent drafting and patent prosecution functionality to help with sequence listing, large molecule, and antibody patents. We’ll double-down on our R&D investment to build more functionality for life sciences customers.”

That expansion includes significant investments in developing tools for freedom-to-operate analysis, patent claim charting, licensing, litigation, portfolio analysis, and in-house IP team management. The goal: to become the default platform for patent workflows, from invention disclosure to litigation.

“Our goal is to build the go-to AI-powered platform to help inventors, in-house teams, and outside counsel law firms collaborate across every part of the patent process,” the company said. “We’ve started with patent application drafting and prosecution. We’re now expanding into invention harvesting, freedom to operate analysis, claim charting, licensing, litigation, patent portfolio management, and more.”

The new funding arrives with two influential partners joining Solve’s corner: Microsoft and Thomson Reuters. Microsoft brings infrastructure strength and a strong brand reputation among legal professionals. The partnership grants Solve expanded access to Azure’s secure compute resources and enables deeper integrations with Microsoft Word. “Our strategic partnership with Microsoft… will enable us to serve state-of-the-art AI systems specialized for patents at scale in a 100% secure and confidential environment,” the company said.

Microsoft’s legal footprint also opens doors in terms of usability. “Legal workflows are deeply embedded in Microsoft products, such as Microsoft Word. Our strategic partnership with Microsoft will enable us to deepen our integrations with Word,” Parsonson said.

Meanwhile, Thomson Reuters brings legal content, sales channels, and data integration opportunities. “In addition to opening up more sales and distribution channels for Solve Intelligence as we continue to scale into more global and AmLaw firms,” the company noted, “product integrations with Westlaw and CoCounsel are potentially on the horizon, and this will enable us to leverage proprietary legal and case law data sets as we expand our product offering.”

Solve is entering an increasingly competitive space where players like PatSnap, IPRally, HarveyAI, and Casetext—acquired by Thomson Reuters for $650 million—are all vying for dominance. But unlike many of its competitors, Solve emphasizes not just AI performance, but attorney-level customization, style control, and multimodal capability. The platform handles chemical structures, biological sequences, figures, and more.

Legal professionals can also use Solve to generate invention disclosure forms, manage disclosures in one place, and standardize the invention submission process. The drafting suite supports all patent types—standalone, continuation, divisional, continuation-in-part, and design—and facilitates collaborative drafting of office action responses, complete with built-in citations to legal sources.

According to the team, much of the current patent workflow remains broken. “There’s very little software penetration in this space,” said Parsonson. “Most patent work is being done inside Word, email, and PDF preview. There are a lot of inefficient and poor-quality workflows.”

Solve Intelligence sees itself as the infrastructure for the future of intellectual property. “Solve Intelligence, guided by IP legal professionals, will be the core underlying software substrate powering the research and innovation in every technology company,” the company stated.