Tom Hochstatter has looked at patents from both sides now. After two decades of working in IP, the Techson IP president has seen invention from many perspectives: R&D, innovation workflow, technology, legal strategy, and—get ready for it!—inventor. Some 15 years ago, a client brought him in to help the corporate team innovate in the e-commerce space. They came up with a few dozen ideas and prosecuted patents for three of them: a method for providing relevant offers to customers, another for matching sellers with buyers, and a system to use geographic data for credit approval. The first two were eventually abandoned. The third was granted a couple of years ago. “It’s interesting to be a named inventor because I’ve gone through the whole process,” Hochstatter says. “You understand what works well and where the challenges are.”
Hochstatter has been bringing that understanding to Techson IP, an Austin-based company he co-founded with two partners. Techson helps clients grasp the economic potential of their patent portfolios with its proprietary platform, Limestone.
Patent insider
Who: Tom Hochstatter
Innovation cred: Co-Founder and President of Techson IP, inventor, founded and sold a tech firm dubbed “the match.com for IP.”
Favorite invention: The pocket rivet patent granted on May 20, 1873 to a tailor named Jacob Davis of Reno, and his fabric supplier and financial backer, a San Francisco dry goods company called Levi Strauss. “I grew up in California in the 60s and 70s, and Levi’s were the local favorite brand,” says Hochstatter. “The famed 501 jeans had that rebel image for us teens. I’ve been wearing Levi’s since then.”
Most promising patent: Hochstatter can’t narrow it down to just one. “I’m tracking patents—and patent litigation cases—in personal fitness and health wearables.” Those companies include Masimo, Oura, Ultrahuman, and Fitbit, along with continuous glucose monitoring providers like Dexcom. “The day will come when we are connected to healthcare providers, which should lead to major advances in preventative medicine,” Hochstatter says. “Here’s to Healthmaxxing!”
Limestone gives patent holders a good sense of how the market views their inventions and what kind of value it places on them. Armed with that insight, executives can use it to make decisions on where to innovate further, whether to sell or litigate inventions in the portfolio, or abandon certain patents altogether.
IFI CLAIMS caught up with Hochstatter this past spring to talk about Techson’s focus on helping clients monetize, the three pillars of Limestone, patent trends that could prove to be bullish, and why Techson IP chose IFI CLAIMS as the data backbone for Limestone. The interview has been edited for clarity and length.
IFI CLAIMS: How did you land in the patent space?
Hochstatter: By accident. I’ve been in the intellectual property space since 2007. I had been around intellectual property in past career positions in corporate development and M&A activity, but patents were basically on the periphery of what I was working on. In 2007, I had the opportunity to join some former colleagues of mine from AT&T; they had formed an IP brokerage business that I found fascinating. And I’ve been in IP now for just under 20 years. I helped the original founders of Techson IP get started in 2015, and then I joined them full time in 2018.
I never had this specific career trajectory in mind, but I’ve always found the business of innovation fascinating. It certainly served my disposition. I’m curious. I’m an inventor and an entrepreneur. I like getting involved in technologies, research, law, even though I’m not an IP attorney. My career requires a unique mix of skills versus a vertical orientation to a particular skill set. My career scratches my innovator’s itch on a daily basis.
IFI CLAIMS: So you are an inventor? What technology space were you working in?
Hochstatter: We actually were hired by one of our clients back in 2011 to come into their corporation and help them invent. So we came in as some extra creative minds and helped the company invent in the e-commerce and credit card space. I’m a named inventor on three, but it was actually on behalf of a client. They weren’t specific ideas that I developed on my own.
It’s interesting to be a named inventor because I’ve gone through the whole process. I think we generated some 50 new ideas, worked with counsel on behalf of our client, and then whittled those ideas down to about a dozen prosecutions, and ultimately ended up with four of them. As a result, I have lots of empathy for inventors and entrepreneurs, prosecution counsel and corporate IP people. After the experience of getting under the skin and understanding the workflow of these companies, you understand what works well and where the challenges are.
Before my corporate development and IP career experiences, I’d been in tech, starting with Boeing and Microsoft in the 80s. I have a disposition toward applying technology to hard problems. And that’s what I’ve been doing throughout the IP portion of my career. Every company I’ve been a part of has had a deep technology foundation—software, then SaaS, and now AI. And that’s where we live today at Techson with our solution Limestone.
Our bias is around monetization. The perennial question has always been, ‘What is the fair value of the patents in my portfolio?’ We mostly orient our analysis around that question.”
IFI CLAIMS: Tell us more about Techson and Limestone. What problem were you trying to solve for your customers?
Hochstatter: The original problem that we were attacking was around traditional patent research services, which was the core initial offering. My co-founders worked for another research services company and felt clients could be better served with a high-touch offering. So they started Techson in its original form, and then in 2018, when I joined, we brought some outside capital and more of a technology bias. At that point, we built a technology platform to support our research services business—that is Limestone. Since then, the platform has been continuously evolving. After AI came on the scene, we added a transaction practice. In short, we’re a strategic IP advisory firm that focuses on three pillars: a transaction practice; a research and consulting practice, which is now expanded to include large portfolio administration; and now, we have the patent monetization agentic platform. Each business works independently, but also works together with the others in terms of insight, scale, and accessibility.
IFI CLAIMS: Give me an example of a client on a day-to-day basis that is coming to you. Maybe they fall into one pillar or all three pillars. What’s a real-world problem that you’re helping them solve?
Hochstatter: We work with an array of clients. Either original patent holders themselves, their counsel—whether that’s litigation counsel or prosecution counsel—or others in the service of IP within those companies. But let me give you a specific example. Let’s take a Fortune 500 company, for instance, with thousands of global patents. Maybe they’re having a hard time really understanding what is in their portfolio. They probably prosecute by strategic design, and they keep accumulating intellectual property but haven’t had the time to really understand the portfolio holistically. We come in and bring our expertise and technology, which is Limestone, and apply our objective external lens to give an independent assessment of their portfolio. Our results tell the clients what the market may think of the intellectual property. They can use our conclusions to justify a number of things: perhaps the IP is super valuable and should be monetized; or because it’s valuable, the patent should be maintained; or, if the patent isn’t valuable, the client might divest it or abandon it. If the technology is leading edge, according to the market, the patent prosecution team might be told to continue innovating the certain core areas.
All of this analysis is integrated with information from the Fortune 500 company insiders, who understand the strategic objectives of the products, the patents, and the corporate budgets. The process is a triumvirate of sorts between our technology, our expertise, and their insight in order to provide them with the information needed to make definitive business decisions about what to do next. That said, our bias is around monetization. The perennial question has always been, “What is the fair value of the patents in my portfolio?” We mostly orient our analysis around that question. There are a number of variables that go into that calculus, but we provide that starting point against which others apply their insight, bias, and information to come to a strategic decision on the patents.
Furthermore, with our transaction business, if a company chooses to divest or find financing, we can service them in that capacity too. What we don’t want to be is a consultant that just comes in, illuminates or illustrates our clients’ problems, and then walks off the field. We want to be in partnership with that client through the lifecycle of that intellectual property, not simply a transactional partner that’s one and done. Patents are an evolving asset, and just providing a snapshot approach doesn’t serve our clients as well as they deserve.
One such example client – a large medical device client with more than 2,000 global patents engaged Techson and our use of Limestone to assess a three-year maintenance-payment decision horizon. By assessing each patent for its unique “monetization” potential, or our objective external lens and overlaying that with each patent’s remaining term of life, we provided this client with decision insights they’ve never had before. Neither their counsel, nor maintenance payment provider could guide the internal teams to make the necessary strategic “pay/don’t pay” decisions. Their IP and product teams married our unique insights to their proprietary internal knowledge and made confident, value-backed maintenance decisions for the first time ever.
Most importantly, our fee to exercise this analysis was but a fraction of the money they will now (confidently) save on patents over the next three years that truly do not provide ongoing business protection value to the client. We see this ROI on every single client.
IFI CLAIMS: Can you walk us through some of the technology Limestone uses to build its reports?
Hochstatter: The problem we’re trying to solve is doing that patent value calculus at an unprecedented scale. The way that works today is that we receive a cold list of patents from a client. Our job is to go through that stack quickly and efficiently and provide an assessment at scale so the client can meet its business objective. In our partnership with IFI, we take the list of patents, import them into Limestone, which goes to IFI and grabs core bibliographic data from your rich databases. Then we apply a series of agentic cascades and workflows. I can’t go into too much detail, but I can say that we use the top models (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta, xAI, Perplexity), as well as our foundational LLM models. Just within those vendors, there are approximately 150 different versions of their models that are also baked into the platform, and we have access to those with Limestone. We can mix and match those different models in different outcomes to deliver analysis.
We define those as cascades. For any one patent in our deliverables, there could be hundreds to thousands of various prompts and iterations and tests and regression analyses and hallucination checks and relevancy checks. Then checks on those checks. From there, our output is centered around three pillars of actionability for patent valuation and monetization. Those three pillars are enforceability, infringement, and economic analysis. So in the vocabulary of AI and large language models, there’s this notion of real data and a notion of synthetic data. Synthetic data is the new data that you generate from your platform. In our case, IFI provides us that bibliographic or that real data. And from there, our Limestone platform creates the three pillars of synthetic data. Our enforceability matrix judges the legal strength of the patent. The infringement analysis is a stratified version of claim charts at a deep level. Then we do an economic assessment. Is there real value here in monetization or direct infringement? What we found is that if any of the three main elements are weak, the entire value equation is undermined. For example, if I have a strong patent with no infringement reads and very little economics at risk, that’s probably not a patent worth pursuing. That data informs a maintenance decision or further prosecution decision for an open patent family.
IFI CLAIMS: How does that work from the client level?
Hochstatter: Say the chief IP officer of a Fortune 500 medical device client has 10,000 patents but doesn’t know what exactly is in the portfolio. That executive needs a summation. We can build rich, high-level, executive summaries to give the management or IP team some insight for their decisions. Maintain or not? Divest or not? Litigate or not? Secure litigation counsel? Secure litigation funding or not? Everything we produce is not just data for results’ sake; it’s to make that next logical business decision with that output. If we don’t service that original idea, it’s not included in Limestone. We’re not about layering on feature after feature just to have capacity and breadth. In fact, we would love to do it with fewer features and give the client the same actionability. And that’s always sort of the challenge for us. How much is too much? Or how little is too little to make that next logical decision? A key point here is that we’re also our own consumer of Limestone data. With the transaction practice, we consume Limestone every day when we’re on a brokerage engagement. We receive that cold patent list and analyze it using Limestone. We make our business decisions on whether we’re going to accept and represent that portfolio or we’re not interested. Our agentic outputs on a large portfolio are very difficult and expensive to do with traditional means. Hundreds of hours, dozens of weeks in production can now be achieved in seconds, minutes, and hours.
Other outputs from this data depend on the situation. If the decision maker is a litigator or potential plaintiff counsel who wants to seek litigation funding for a portfolio, we can construct a litigation funding memo with all the insight the counsel needs for underwriting. We can do a detailed Evidence of Use chart that is editable and in a format useful to complaint filing. We have maintenance decision summaries to help the budget holder of those patents make business decisions on a value equation of the maintenance. That goes way beyond a simple due date and payment schedule that typical patent annuity providers do. They have exceptional systems globally to make payments in the various patent offices around the world. It’s a useful service, but they’re not helping give insight to the business decision maker along the way. As we’ve watched the cost of maintenance fees continue to grow, those maintenance fee decisions are getting more and more expensive.
Our results tell the clients what the market may think of the intellectual property. They can use our conclusions to justify a number of things: perhaps the IP is super valuable and should be monetized; or because it’s valuable, the patent should be maintained; or, if the patent isn’t valuable, the client might divest it or abandon it. If the technology is leading edge, according to the market, the patent prosecution team might be told to continue innovating the certain core areas.”
IFI CLAIMS: You just mentioned maintenance fees as a trend in the patent space. Are there any other trends you’re following?
Hochstatter: There are two in particular that we track. The current U.S. administration’s approach to the USPTO under Director John Squires and his discretionary use of denials of Inter Partes Review (IPR) at the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB). It is significant. It is a tailwind, as we describe it, on the monetization side. We believe they’re bringing a level of bullishness and predictability to monetization, whether it be licensing, sale or litigation in court. That’s a trend we’re watching closely.
The second trend is the maturity and decision making of the Unified Patent Court in Europe. We’re watching what’s going on there with injunctive relief in certain European countries, and the UPC’s long-arm rulings around Standard Essential Patent royalty rates and establishing global FRAND (Fair, Reasonable, and Non-Discriminatory) rates. They’re elbowing into the global legal space. That’s another tailwind opportunity. It’s providing predictability and certainty for monetization in foreign courts, inspiring reticent patent holders to avail their portfolios for monetization purposes. So that’s been somewhat of an emergent boon for our business around the transaction practice.
IFI CLAIMS: Why did you decide to use IFI CLAIMS as your data provider?
Hochstatter: We’ve known the company for a very long time. I’ve used IFI in previous companies. IFI has been a terrific partner, a reliable partner, an accessible partner, and so the decision was easy. IFI has broad global access to patent office data. So we know we can rely on that. The team is customer-oriented and forward-facing. We appreciate that because we’re a small company, and when we need help, we need it right away. The IFI team is so responsive. We stick with what works. IFI understands the business as deeply as we do.
