A licensed rights position
Clinical workflow, device data, payer automation, or retail systems claims licensed into the venture, with the field of use written down.
Intellectual Frontiers Studios
Building the most impactful companies
Intellectual Frontiers Studios starts companies around licensed patents and findings that already survived contact with real hospital, device, trial site, insurance, and marketplace operations, then runs them until they can stand alone.
We charter a venture when we hold a rights position, somebody has already paid for something adjacent, and an operator who knows the market is willing to own the outcome. Nobody starts a payer-operations company because payer operations look big.
Paid work beats pilots. A hospital that put a purchase order against an operating budget line has told us more than ten that signed a letter of intent, and a research site paying monthly tells us more than a free vendor pilot. Ventures that cannot earn revenue against a real budget line get closed early and cheaply.
The ventures worth chartering do work nobody was staffed to do. A company that reads every denial a plan issues the day it lands, or one that keeps a device submission's evidence assembled while the product runs, is doing a job that did not exist to be automated. That is a harder company to start and a much harder one to displace.
What a partner gets on day one
A company that starts above zero, because the hard parts are already in place before the first hire.
Operators with scar tissue
People who have carried an FDA submission, an insurance integration, a trials platform rollout, or a large system replacement to the finish.
A first buyer in reach
Our research relationships are where most ventures find their first paying customer, rather than starting cold.
A written exit path
Entity, cap table, closure condition, and independence plan are set at the charter and held to when the venture gets uncomfortable.
Where ventures get built
Healthcare delivery, where the problem is usually getting outside data into a clinician's hands without another interface project. Medical devices, where the software organization decides whether the hardware ships on time. Insurance and digital authorization, where who may read what, and the proof it happened, consume operations budgets. Clinical trials, where the study still runs on binders and reconciliation. Digital marketplaces and payments, where many parties have to settle and keep the evidence.
Each of those is a market we have worked in. We do not charter ventures in markets nobody here has operated.
How to engage
Operators bring a market they have run and a problem they know is worth paying for. Health systems, manufacturers, insurers, and research organizations bring an internal project that should be a company but will never get funded inside. Investors bring capital alongside Intellectual Frontiers Capital once a venture has contracted revenue.
Come prepared to say what has already been paid for, what right the venture would need, and who would own the outcome.
Before bringing a venture
These pages show the standard a proposal is measured against.
- Portfolio of substantial works
Every venture and shared service we have chartered, including the ones we closed.
- Use cases
Deployments we have run in provider, device, trials, insurance, and marketplace settings.
- Patent register
Rights positions available to license into a new company.
- Market potential analyses
How we size a market before committing people to it.
- Contact Studios
Send the market, the paying buyer, and the operator who would run it.
Every venture is chartered to stand on its own. If it still needs the parent after a few years, we got something wrong at the start and we say so.