11 Facts About Intellectual Ventures

Intellectual Ventures is an American private equity company that centers on the development and licensing of intellectual property.

Intellectual Ventures is one of the top-five owners of US patents, as of 2011.

Intellectual Ventures has been described as the country's largest and most notorious patent trolling company, the ultimate patent troll, and the most hated company in tech.

In 2000, Intellectual Ventures was founded as a private partnership by Nathan Myhrvold and Edward Jung of Microsoft, later joined by co-founders Peter Detkin of Intel, and Gregory Gorder of Perkins Coie.

In 2009, Intellectual Ventures launched a prototyping and research laboratory, Intellectual Ventures Lab, hiring scientists to imagine inventions which could exist but do not yet exist, and then filing descriptions of these inventions with the US Patent Office.

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Lowell Wood, an "inventor in residence" at Intellectual Ventures, became the most-patented inventor in US history in 2015, breaking the record held by Thomas Edison for over 80 years.

Intellectual Ventures has created a number of independent companies to bring its discoveries to mass market.

Intellectual Ventures' purchased patents have largely been kept secret, though press releases with Telcordia and Transmeta indicated some or all of their patent portfolios were sold to the company.

Intellectual Ventures has been described as a "patent troll" by Shane Robison, CTO of Hewlett Packard and others, allegedly accumulating patents not in order to develop products around them but with the goal to pressure large companies into paying licensing fees.

On December 8,2010, in its 10th year of operations, Intellectual Ventures filed its first lawsuit, accusing Check Point, McAfee, Symantec, Trend Micro, Elpida, Hynix, Altera, Lattice and Microsemi of patent infringement.

Intellectual Ventures staff are active in lobbying and testifying in court on United States patent policy.