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YC Root AccessYC Root Access

How Solve Intelligence Is Building the Future of AI Patent Law

Solve Intelligence (S23) builds AI software for patent attorneys. More than 700 IP teams use it, including firms like Perkins Coie and DLA Piper and in-house teams at Intel and Siemens.

Diana HuhostChrisguestSanjguest
Nov 10, 202631mWatch on YouTube

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At a glance

WHAT IT’S REALLY ABOUT

Solve Intelligence: early launch, paid feedback, and AI patent workflows

  1. The speakers describe Solve Intelligence starting as a two-week-old side project that became a YC application “whim,” where talking to patent attorneys during the application led to sharper positioning and a pivot.
  2. They explain that launching extremely early—before they felt they had a product—created urgency that produced their first paid customer within weeks, and rapid iteration based on churn and real usage.
  3. They discuss why they chose patents despite lacking legal backgrounds, portraying it as a large, technical, under-tooled industry requiring specialized multimodal workflows rather than generic chat-based AI.
  4. They outline how the company grew quickly without dedicated salespeople by focusing on paid feedback (no free trials), learning repeatable sales patterns, and later recognizing they should have hired earlier to scale faster.
  5. They contrast San Francisco’s ambition and YC’s metric-driven cadence with London’s hiring advantages, arguing founders can build globally from London while traveling to serve a primarily US market.

IDEAS WORTH REMEMBERING

5 ideas

The YC application became a forcing function for customer discovery and a pivot.

Chris described applying to YC as a long shot, but said the application process itself pushed the team to talk to patent attorneys for the first time, clarify what they were building, and pivot the idea while continuing to build.

Launching before you feel ready can accelerate shipping and learning, even if early customers churn.

Chris said they launched within the first one or two weeks of the batch despite not having a shippable product, using the public commitment as pressure to host and deliver something quickly; the first sale happened that week but the customer churned soon after.

Charging from day one made feedback higher-signal and helped compound growth through churn reduction and expansion.

Chris attributed their early “millions in annual revenue” without salespeople to launching early, refusing free trials, and using paying customers as the feedback signal while tracking growth and churn; he added they could have grown faster if they had hired earlier.

Their first customer failure clarified the real buyer: patent attorneys, not inventors.

After refunding an early inventor customer who produced a poor draft, Chris said they learned not to sell to inventors and instead sold to patent attorneys; he described outbounding on LinkedIn as the path to their first lawyer customer who stuck.

Solve’s differentiation is workflow- and modality-specific productization, not a generic chat interface.

Chris and others argued patents are unusually technical and “multimodal,” requiring specialized workflows and UX (chemical structures, drawings, biological sequences, equations, tabular data, claim charts, office actions), which they said generic chat tools don’t cover well.

WORDS WORTH SAVING

5 quotes

I think that's a thing when you find co-founders where you're just really impressed. You shouldn't hesitate. You should just go for it.

— Sanj

I reckon we should launch, and we're going to the YC retreat the next day.

— Chris

We had no product, so we then spent the following weekend getting actually spun up and serving it on the Monday.

— Chris

I realized that the vast majority of academic research is, um, not actually useful.

— Chris

Take ridiculous ownership over what you're doing.

— Sanj

Read the available transcript
Origin story and YC application timingCustomer discovery with patent attorneysLaunching with minimal product as a forcing functionPaid-only feedback vs free trialsFounder-led sales and outbound via LinkedInWhy patents differ from general legal techMultimodal patent workflows and UX design choices (claim charts, office actions)

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SPEAKERS

  • Diana Hu

    host

    Host/moderator for YC Root Access (Y Combinator).

  • Chris

    guest

    CEO and cofounder of Solve Intelligence; completed a PhD in AI at UCL.

  • Sanj

    guest

    Cofounder and Chief Research Officer at Solve Intelligence.

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