Getting Minesoft off the ground as a patent solutions provider

Minesoft was founded by Ann Chapman-Daniel and Ophir Daniel in 1996 at their kitchen table, as an ideal way to combine their unique skillset in sci-tech publishing and programming. Together, they took the plunge to establish Minesoft, initially aided by a distribution and development deal by France Telecom.

Minesoft quickly took off as an innovative patent information solutions company. The family-run business blossomed in the field of intellectual property, initially working closely with Questel-Orbit and Research Business Information (RBI Inc) for about five years in marketing, sales and product development, before branching out with Minesoft’s own products in the early 2000s.

In 2003, Minesoft and RWS plc, a publicly quoted UK specialist translation company and one of the largest corporate scientific translation companies in the world today, announced their collaborative endeavour to create PatBase, a searchable database of patent documents designed by experts in the complex art of patent information research. Since inception, PatBase has gone on to attract over 80,000 global users, serving many Fortune 500, FTSE 100, DAX 40 corporations as well as specialist IP companies, patent attorneys, patent search firms, educational institutions, SMEs and more.

From day one, Minesoft competed with much larger international corporations and already established similar SMEs, but Minesoft carved out a niche for themselves through unique expertise and won clients over. The company started in a small way as a supplier to some big companies, which naturally helped the products expand globally.

Growing innovation at Minesoft

Since then, Minesoft has continued developing innovative patent information solutions by bringing on a talented team of software developers, sales, customer support and marketers and listening to customer feedback. These products include Minesoft’s powerful patent analytics solution, PatBase Analytics, which was integrated into PatBase and PatBase Express in 2014 to help users derive competitive intelligence through the ability to generate trend charts from patent data. Pat-KM was launched in 2015, enabling companies to manage and distribute relevant patent documents and vital insights internally. Also, Legal StatusTracker was introduced in 2015, an alert service to let subscribers know when there is a change in the legal status of patents. Later that same year, Chemical Explorer was also introduced, providing an innovative solution for exploring chemical compounds within full text patents.

Recognition of Minesoft’s success

In 2009 and again in 2015, Minesoft won the prestigious Queen’s Award for Enterprise for outstanding achievement in rapidly growing export markets in the field of Intellectual Property (patent) Information – a testament to the international success of PatBase and the dedication of the development, sales and support staff behind it.

More solutions have been introduced to Minesoft’s portfolio including Textmine, PatBase Analytics V2, PatDocs and IPShare.

At the end of 2018, co-founder, Ann Chapman-Daniel, was awarded Best Female Entrepreneur by the Regional Chamber of Commerce Business awards, and Minesoft received the award for Best Business. In 2019, Ann was named Information Professional of the Year by German online information industry magazine, PASSWORD. In the same year, Minesoft was named LegalTech company of the year in the UK and Internationally by ACQ5, a testament to the impact of the recently launched solutions PatDocs and IPShare, which are specifically designed to support legal professionals with speeding-up key activities and collaborating across teams.

The future of Minesoft

This week, Minesoft launched the new PatBase 2.0 search engine, which is the biggest update to PatBase ever. PatBase 2.0 introduces impressive speed, publication-level searching, new search commands, PatBase Analytics V3, and non-Latin and Latin combined indexing to speed up patent searching. The Minesoft team is excited to bring our Users into the latest stage of our innovation journey.

Minesoft will continue developing PatBase 2.0 incrementally over the next period, adapting the usability and features of the platform based on User feedback. Meanwhile, the Minesoft development team will continue to develop functionality in areas like natural language searching and semantics, as well as machine translations and landscape analysis. Artificial Intelligence is a big buzzword in the Online Publishing Industry, and Minesoft is well-positioned to design new ideas in this area to streamline and automate processes across our portfolio of products. As a big data solutions provider, hosting over 140 million patent documents currently (this number increases every day), Minesoft is dedicated to making the right data accessible to our global customers who are pioneering new solutions themselves.

To learn more about PatBase 2.0 and to try out the brand-new system for yourself, click here to register for a commitment-free two-week free trial: https://minesoft.com/patbase/