Our Second Patent Awarded! Fortifying Our Moat

On November 21st, 2023, our patent was awarded for the full MOOS system. This complements a patent and exclusive license on the paper – together creating a strong pillar in our IP strategy.

We received the search report from the patent office, acknowledging the novelty and innovativeness. This is a great vote of confidence and acknowledgment that we’re onto something new and exciting.

While the report delves into every aspect and dissects every claim, it is clear that there is a core around our unconventional route to create sensing surfaces with a smart blend of software and hardware that is unique in the world. If we broaden the scope a bit, such as creating smart shelves or IoT systems, there are suddenly many, many patents that encroach on the same domain but take a more traditional route. We are proud to follow a new path in this field.

Patent? Should We Care?

While the patent is really nice, we realize that this – by itself – does not create a strong IP strategy.

Our core protection mechanism is, in fact, the Coke strategy of guarding a trade secret. The MOOS paper is not reverse-engineerable. Looking at the paper or even analyzing it in a paper lab might provide a clue on particles and maybe even some inkling of the procedure or chemicals used in the process. However, there are a thousand pitfalls and ways to get it wrong and only a very narrow path of getting it right. The search and 200+ lab experiments that preceded our paper making are not easily replicated.

And, once you’ve solved that, there’s another hurdle. We could actually give you the paper and wish you a lot of luck turning it into a sensor. That is not a trivial task to replicate, as the paper provides a noisy and seemingly erratic output signal. Our AI engine, scrubbing and interpreting the signals from the sensor, is also not reverse-engineerable simply by looking at the output. This captures our years of tinkering, launching structured experiments, and large-scale data collection to get a deeper understanding of the intricacies of factors that disturb a signal. The same applies to post-processing and interpreting a low-res matrix combination of signals into an ‘image’ in which products can be distinguished.

All in all, we are proud of a strong strategy for our IP protection.