Using Mattermarks’s list of the Top 100 IoT startups in 2015 (ranked by funding, published in Forbes Oct 25, 2015) Ipqwery has looked behind the analytics to reveal the nature of the intellectual property (IP) behind these innovative companies. Our infographic presents a general summary of the IP within the group as a whole, and illustrates the trailing 5-year trends related to IP filing activity.

The vast majority of these companies have both patents (84%) and trademarks (85%) in their IP portfolio. There was a sharp and mostly linear increase in filings for both patents and trademarks, from 2011 through to 2014, with a slight decrease showing in 2015. 2016 looks to be on pace to meet or exceed last year’s filing activity as well. All this is consistent with the ever-expanding number of companies operating within the IoT ecosystem.

A closer look at the top 5 patent class descriptions amongst all patents granted or published yields close results between these classes. This is not surprising given the similar technologies behind many IoT products, such that their patents will incorporate the same or similar descriptions within their claims. Comparatively, there is a wider variance in the Top 5 Trademark classes used, but this speaks more to the wider variety of marketing and branding potential than to the underlying IoT technologies. 

What’s striking in Mattermark’s original analysis of the Top 100 IoT Startups is that 30% of all funding raised by this group as a whole has been concentrated in only the top 5 companies; Jawbone, Genband, Silver Spring Networks, View Glass and Jasper Technologies. Ipqwery’s analysis further reveals that only two of these companies (Silver Spring and Jasper) have Top 5 inventors within the group. In fact, Jasper actually has 2 of the Top 5 inventors. The other top inventors come from Hello and Kineto Wireless.=

The broad-strokes approach of IPqwery’s infographic doesn’t directly illustrate the IP held by any one company, but certainly hints at where exactly this type of analysis could be very useful indeed. For where Mattermark sought to pinpoint where the greatest growth potential (momentum) was within the group of companies by looking at the overall IoT funding environment, IPqwery’s analysis of the general IP trends within this group sheds additional light on the matter, and perhaps raises some additional issues. Wouldn’t potential correlations between IP and funding also be a useful measure of momentum across metrics, and thus shouldn’t IP data be generally more integrated into business growth analytics, from the get go?

Here's a link to a new infographic by IPqwery summarizing the intellectual property held by the Top 100 IoT Startups (2015).