Daniel Ruskin began his profession when he was a mere 14 years outdated as an engineer for Coinbase. As he tells it, he was a youngster “who knew learn how to code and needed to construct cool issues.”
Clearly too younger to get a checking account, Ruskin did freelance growth work he discovered on reddit in alternate for bitcoin. There he noticed that Coinbase was hiring, and boldly despatched the pinnacle of operations a chilly e-mail asking if he might work for the crypto alternate.
“Lengthy story quick, I ended up writing a lot of the early software program that powered the Coinbase platform,” he tells TechCrunch. “I didn’t write the v0 codebase…however I did write a whole lot of software program that introduced us from 1 to 10.”
After 4 years at Coinbase, Ruskin determined to go to school after which to regulation faculty. He began a couple of startups alongside the way in which, together with an election safety firm the place he drafted and received a patent on its know-how.
Pissed off with how “opaque” the patent course of was, Ruskin in December 2024 launched a brand new Salt Lake Metropolis-based firm referred to as Inventex.
Ruskin, now 26, says Inventex desires to ease the method of “making ready and submitting patent purposes” through the use of a collection of AI brokers augmented by licensed attorneys. He believes that Inventex may help firms get patent-pending “10x sooner” — in days, somewhat than months {that a} conventional agency may take.
The idea shortly attracted buyers and after only one month, Ruskin had raised $2.4 million in a pre-seed spherical to develop Inventex. Conviction Capital, Coinbase co-founder Fred Ehrsam, and Cambrian Ventures co-led the financing, which additionally included participation from Enhance and others. The cash was raised through SAFEs at a $10 million valuation.
Inventex intakes the required technical knowledge supplied by its clients reminiscent of code, design paperwork, and technical specs. It then identifies what its clients have invented that meet the authorized necessities for patentability. This consists of trying to find prior artwork or what has been executed earlier than in that individual buyer’s technical area, in addition to “how our buyer is completely different,” Ruskin stated.
The corporate then drafts and recordsdata patent purposes on behalf of the corporate in america and overseas.
Maksim Stepanenko, who labored with Ruskin at Coinbase, tells TechCrunch that Ruskin impressively began main key funds infrastructure tasks on the crypto firm “quickly” after he began whereas nonetheless a highschool pupil. So when he heard about what Ruskin was doing with Inventex, he signed on as a small angel investor as a part of the pre-seed financing.
“He’s considerate, fast-moving, and unusually good at navigating advanced methods,” stated Stepanenko, who’s the founding father of a startup referred to as Operator. “I’ve been following his work ever since [working with him at Coinbase] and was excited to help his new firm. [He’s] one of the quietly spectacular individuals I’ve labored with.”
‘Extra inbound than we are able to deal with’
Apart from velocity, Ruskin claims Inventex’s method will get its clients higher-quality patents too.
“We wonderful tune fashions particularly to every technical space, and our brokers are true consultants in every technical area our clients work in,” he stated. Conventional patent attorneys, Ruskin believes, typically don’t perceive the contours of the innovations they’re defending. The technical-expert brokers are overseen, and refined, by licensed attorneys.
Ruskin is assured that Inventex has the proper mannequin to be progressive on this advanced subset of authorized providers.
“Our opponents promote software program as task-based automation to conventional regulation corporations, and deployment is constrained by their incentives reminiscent of a billable-hour mannequin, and the broader scheme of paying for experience versus outcomes,” he stated. “We upend this by offering the end-to-end service.”
Inventex’s mannequin can also be generalizable, Ruskin claims. For instance, he stated Inventex is at the moment utilizing one among its instruments to automate MSPB (U.S. Benefit Methods Safety Board) complaints for the tens of hundreds of federal staff that have been lately laid off.
“Conventional corporations can’t help that form of workload,” he stated.
It’s early days but however Inventex has about $250,000 of annual recurring income within the pipeline, based on Ruskin, together with two publicly traded firms and quite a few startups. Dirac is one which has given permission to be named.
“We now have extra inbound than we are able to deal with,” Ruskin stated.
Constructing unicorns
Ruskin additionally has experience within the fintech area. He joined Checkr, a service for gig platforms to pay their workforce, in 2022. There, Ruskin says, he helped begin Checkr Pay, “a startup inside a startup.” Throughout his time there, Ruskin employed a workforce of three engineers and “constructed and launched a neobank in about three to 4 months.” (Checkr raised $250 million at a $4.6 billion valuation in 2021.) Ruskin left that firm in 2023 to complete regulation faculty at New York College, the place he graduated within the prime 10% of his class in 2024.
It was throughout his time at Checkr Pay that Ruskin obtained to know Cambrian Ventures’ solo GP Rex Salisbury, who described the younger entrepreneur as the corporate’s “highest velocity engineer.”
“Ask the early Coinbase workforce and so they’ll inform you a similar factor, which is fairly exceptional given he was nonetheless in highschool,” Salisbury instructed TechCrunch. “Daniel helped construct two unicorns (Coinbase and Checkr) earlier than graduating school and has since gone on to graduate regulation faculty and go the patent bar. [He’s a] fairly uncommon mixture of expertise.”
He added: “At this early stage, you don’t consider an organization purely on what it’s, however on what it may be. It’s already exceptional what Daniel has constructed, however given his velocity what actually excites me is how shortly he’s executed to construct extra.”
Making patents extra accessible
Inventex has grown 2x per 30 days since December primarily by way of word-of-mouth referrals and partnerships with VCs. The corporate prices clients a month-to-month price to construct a patent portfolio. The price consists of invention discovery, drafting, submitting, and patent prosecution.
Presently, it has three full-time staff (all engineers) and a number of other contract patent attorneys.
Inventex’s closest opponents are patent drafting instruments like Edge and Resolve, based on Ruskin.
Earlier than Inventex, Ruskin based Motif in July 2024, which had the identical idea, however with a co-founder that “didn’t work out.”
Trying forward, Ruskin is contemplating providing Inventex’s drafting toolkit as a white-labeled product for regulation corporations to allow them to license its instruments “to get their purchasers higher patents, sooner.”
“This aligns with our long-term imaginative and prescient for the sphere of patent regulation. Proper now, 90% of the billable time for an preliminary patent submitting is spent on drafting a disclosure; 10% is spent on technique,” he stated. “This may flip in 5 years — drafting will take 10% of the time, and technique would be the differentiated service supplied by corporations. This in the end brings the associated fee to file a patent down, and makes the system extra accessible to innovators of any dimension.”
