Our Portfolio
Backing the most inventive deep tech and AI IP companies at the seed stage.
Investments in Foundational Technology
Every company in our portfolio shares a common thread: proprietary intellectual property that creates durable competitive advantage in a market of significant and growing importance.
Companies We Back
Detailed information on each of our portfolio investments, including investment amount, thesis, and current status.
SpaceX
Space Exploration Technologies Corp. is a private aerospace manufacturer and space transportation company headquartered in Hawthorne, California. SpaceX designs, manufactures, and launches advanced rockets and spacecraft with deep proprietary IP in reusable rocket propulsion, autonomous landing systems, and orbital mechanics. The company's Falcon 9, Falcon Heavy, and Starship vehicles represent a generation of aerospace IP that has fundamentally disrupted the launch market. SpaceX's Starlink satellite constellation further demonstrates the breadth of its IP portfolio across both launch and connectivity infrastructure.
Tesla
Tesla, Inc. designs, develops, manufactures, leases, and sells electric vehicles, energy generation, and storage systems. Tesla's IP portfolio spans automotive engineering, battery chemistry, power electronics, autonomous driving neural networks, and manufacturing robotics. The company holds thousands of patents covering innovations from cell chemistry to in-cabin AI to grid-scale energy storage. Tesla's integration of hardware and software AI represents one of the most comprehensive deep tech IP portfolios in the modern technology industry, creating structural competitive moats across multiple adjacent markets.
Robinhood
Robinhood Markets, Inc. is an American financial services company known for its commission-free trading platform. The company has built a proprietary technology stack covering algorithmic order routing, AI-driven personalization, real-time market data processing, and fractional share infrastructure. Robinhood's IP innovations in financial accessibility and retail investing technology have established it as a market leader in democratized financial services. The firm's intellectual property covers both the front-end user experience innovations and the complex back-end systems that enable real-time, commission-free trading at scale.
Skype
Skype Technologies S.A. pioneered peer-to-peer internet telephony and video communications, establishing a foundational IP portfolio in real-time communications protocols, voice-over-IP compression algorithms, and distributed networking technology. The company's innovations in encrypted communication, audio processing, and cross-platform compatibility defined the modern internet communications landscape. Skype's patent portfolio in voice recognition, noise cancellation, and real-time media streaming continues to influence the development of next-generation communication platforms.
Baidu
Baidu, Inc. is a Chinese multinational technology company specializing in internet-related services and artificial intelligence. Baidu operates one of the world's largest search engines and has built an extensive AI IP portfolio spanning natural language processing, computer vision, autonomous driving, cloud computing, and conversational AI. The company's Apollo autonomous driving platform and PaddlePaddle deep learning framework represent particularly significant IP assets. Baidu's position as a leading AI research institution in Asia provides access to research output and patent filings at the frontier of machine learning science.
How We Select Portfolio Companies
Every NL Patent AI Capital investment begins with a rigorous assessment of the company's intellectual property landscape. We evaluate the breadth, depth, and defensibility of the existing patent portfolio alongside the pipeline of pending applications and trade secret assets. We are particularly interested in IP that covers enabling layers of technology — the foundational inventions that subsequent applications depend upon.
Beyond IP analysis, we assess the founding team's ability to continue generating novel IP as the company scales. The best deep tech companies are not static IP holders — they are continuously innovating, filing new patents, and extending their technical moats as the competitive landscape evolves.
Finally, we evaluate the commercial pathway for the IP — whether through direct product commercialization, licensing, or the creation of a market-defining platform that creates network effects around the patent portfolio.
Building Something at the IP Frontier?
We are actively seeking our next portfolio investment. If you are a founder working on breakthrough AI or deep tech IP, we want to hear your story.