A new analysis from Paximal, built on Juristat USPTO assignee data, screened 187 US tech companies that raised $100 million or more between August 2025 and August 2026. 107 of them, 57%, have no visible US patent applications. Thirteen raised a billion dollars or more with nothing on file.
For prosecution firms, that is a business-development map: billion-dollar raises sitting behind empty dockets, each one a strategic-counseling conversation waiting to happen. For the in-house teams that do exist, it is a filing checklist and a reason to get assignments recorded under the right name before diligence asks. See how Juristat fuels business development.
The usual reason these portfolios stay empty is that patents feel too slow to matter when models ship every quarter. The data complicates that. Standard prosecution is slow: applications that reached disposition in 2025 averaged 26.6 months from filing (Juristat USPTO data). But Track One prioritized examination targets a final decision in about 12 months, for a set fee. The speed objection is answered by a program that already exists.
Paximal’s full analysis walks through the Section 101 and open-weights arguments and the company-by-company screen. It is worth reading in full:
Read “The AI Bubble and the Patent Gap” on Paximal → https://www.paximal.com/insights/the-ai-bubble-and-the-patent-gap
The screen behind it resolved a full year of venture funding against assignee-level USPTO data: the entity-resolved record of more than 10 million applications and 20-plus years of prosecution history that makes “who in this cohort has actually filed” a question you can answer before it becomes urgent.