Electric & Eclectic with Roger Atkins - LinkedIn Top Voice for EV

Unlocking Innovation: The Patent Marketplace Revolution

• Roger Atkins

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  • Benedetta Arese Lucini reveals how AI is matchmaking inventors with investors to accelerate global innovation!

We discuss the revolutionary Atom Patent Assistant with founder Benedetta Arese Lucini, a marketplace connecting inventors with companies seeking innovation solutions across multiple industries. The platform uses AI to make 150 million patents searchable and accessible, helping match ideas with the capital needed to bring them to market.

• Atom creates a bridge between inventors (particularly in universities and startups) and companies with the resources to commercialize their ideas
• Patents typically only last 20 years, creating opportunities for companies to discover innovations that are no longer protected
• The platform uses AI to translate complex patent language and identify potential applications beyond what's explicitly stated
• Bernadette's background in finance and technology helps her understand both the inventor and commercial perspectives
• Atom's valuation tools aim to help innovators understand the true worth of their intellectual property
• The platform works by finding ideas first rather than people, unlike traditional networking platforms
• While patents are public, finding relevant ones has historically been difficult without specialized tools
• Atom's model combines artificial intelligence with human expertise to unlock innovation potential

Follow Roger on LinkedIn to stay updated on the latest electric vehicle developments and innovation trends in batteries, energy, and data.


Speaker 1:

So we have uploaded about a few million patents that are of the most recent inventions in the years. Hello and welcome to the Electric and Eclectic podcast show with Roger Atkins.

Speaker 2:

Hello everybody, I'm going to talk to Benedette Benedette Arazzi of Atom, a fascinating company doing something that has always struck me could maybe be done a lot better, which is find out what ideas are around, maybe from current times or even in the past, and actually reflect on what those ideas are, what those patents are, those inventions, and actually put them together with the thinking and the ideas and the commercial proposition that we see around us today by the way, not just for electric vehicles or renewable energy and the stuff I normally bang on about, I guess pretty much for everything. So, bernadette, welcome to the Electric and Eclectic podcast show Atom Patent Assistant. It's a market, really, isn't it? It's a patent market. Can you give us all a quick introduction to what it is and then we'll get into the background of how you've made it, what your ambition is and all of that stuff. I mean, what is the Atom Patent Assistant or market?

Speaker 1:

Yes.

Speaker 1:

So our idea with Atom the actual website, if you want to find it, is atomgroupai and it's a marketplace of patents.

Speaker 1:

So we have uploaded about a few million patents that are of the most recent inventions in the years, coming from all over the world that have at least patented in Europe, and the idea is that if you're a head of innovation, head of R&D in a big corporate and you want to like find something and you're deciding if the invented internally or buy it out, you can find what's already out there, specifically done in startups, spinouts, university environments, where generally they need help and capital to bring stuff to market, and you can connect, search, use the research assistant to read better patents, because I don't know how many of the listeners have ever read the patent, but it's really complicated, so it helps.

Speaker 1:

You summarize it in normal English language or whatever actually language you want, and ask questions, see how relevant it can be for your business, and then, if you are interested, you just click a button which says get this patent and it comes to us and our team here at Atom and we connect you to the relevant person and the inventors who own the patent so that then you can have the opportunity to do a further due diligence and then to create a deal, so a licensing agreement or buying it outright or some kind of partnership, and this, hopefully, will drive innovation further. We love the space of electric vehicles, batteries, because it's like something it's on top of mind of a lot of companies that we're talking to from the, obviously, motor space, but also, for example, yachting industry is one we're looking into very closely, um, but we go from we can actually find patents on anything from like, on anything from like recyclable cements to women, health to food technology and food substitutes and anything in between.

Speaker 2:

Wow, wow, I mean, listen, it is. It is amazing, it's a treasure trove. I, I had a look, I signed up. It was very easy, by the way. Um, I just got straight into it. I don't, I'm not clever enough to have a patent, I'm not. I'm not an inventor, but what I did, it say am I right in remembering this? 150 million searchable patent documents, was that? How the heck have you got all that on there? I mean, you know, we'll get into your background in a moment, because I just find it hard to understand how much of the digital world actually works. I mean, I get the principle, but the practical application how the devil can you have this searchable resource that already? Because you've only been doing it? What? Since last summer you had this idea?

Speaker 2:

Yes last summer. How can you suddenly have so much resource inside it? Already? I did a search by the way, I did one for wireless charging, because I thought I know a bit about this. So I wondered if there's some stuff I didn't know about that would pop up in terms of who's got patents on wireless charging for electric vehicles. I was astonished. Yeah, yeah, I'm thinking, oh my word, I thought I kind of knew everything and well, I knew a few things, but clearly there's there's a lot more going on. So, yeah, straight away, I can see it's very exciting. Let's get into your background please, bernadette. Yeah, how, how? Why are you doing this right now? Tell us a story about Bernadette Arazzi. Where are you on the journey of life?

Speaker 1:

Bernadette, yes, so I am being a very lucky teenager because my dad was an entrepreneur and so I got to spend time in his office and I got so passionate about computers. He had like a tech company in the 90s, right, so very different from today but I got like my favorite thing at 12 was to spend time in sitting on a computer in his office, so it was like something I got close to very quickly and so I started talking about startups and venture capital and starting companies when I was really young and we got to see anything. Then he sold his software business and he started also investing in anything from like actually nuclear fusion to solar panels, and so I was very lucky to be around these like really passionate inventors, and what I realized is that my sister, for example, she's a PhD in physics and she's really talented and very smart but probably doesn't want to start her own business, and so, like her, a lot of people who are sitting in the research departments of universities are extremely talented way more talented than what I can ever be and so I thought how can I help these people find ways to bring their innovation to companies? And, on the other side, because I was like one of the first people in Uber, and then I worked in Rocket Internet e commerce, and then I started my finance fintech companies. I realized, as an entrepreneur, you're always trying to beat the market and to be number one. You always need to be the leader and find new things that are happening and get them fast.

Speaker 1:

And so, as a company builder and as a company founder, I realized there must be so many other companies around there that are always struggling with innovation and they want to get faster at getting innovation.

Speaker 1:

Then, as a European I'm Italian, but as a European, I must say and in this moment I think it hits even more at heart I didn't want just the like big tech American companies to gobble up every market. If you look at the amount of spending of R&D of the whole S&P 500 companies, 42% of that budget is spent by only 10 companies, so all the rest spend very little. And I was like these 10 companies, which are the usual the Meta, google, amazon, nvidia of the world are gobbling up not only their industry right, the general computers but they're going into energy and transportation and all these sectors where there's companies that have been around for much longer that are risking getting like disrupted. And so what I'm trying to do is to help all those companies around there find ways to become and stay competitive, not by developing everything internally, but by collaborating with all these geniuses that are in the market.

Speaker 2:

And my big vision it is a big vision and it's a wonderful vision and it very much feeds into much of what I see many other clever people doing, which is the word you just said collaboration. Collaboration, um years ago I excuse me a moment, one Years ago I had the good fortune to be in the company of a gentleman called Ross Braun. Ross Braun is a Formula One boss and he was talking to students who sixth form students in the town I live in Brackley that's where his race team was at the time and telling them about, you know, their future prospects. And he kind of slightly alarmingly said all of you are going to fail in life if you try to do it on your own. It's all about teamwork, it's all about collaboration, it's all about partnerships. You know, it may be simply your partner in life, you know, or some some good friends that take you on the journey of life to make it happy, successful and enjoyable too, perhaps. But what he used was an acronym. He said the acronym I'm very fond of in motorsports and I can give you lots of stories to illustrate it is TEAM, t-e-a-m. Together, everyone achieves more, and that's what you're talking about.

Speaker 2:

So this is a meeting place for inventors, isn't it. It's a meeting place for inventors and it's a matchmaking service to the investors and liberators and companies who have got a missing piece of the jigsaw. And this person, these inventors, these wonderfully clever people as you suggest, person these inventors, these wonderfully clever people as you suggest. Well, here's the thing I've found in my journey of life, my career a lot of brilliant engineers aren't very good at pitching. They're not very good at business, quite frankly. They can conjure up magnificent things, but they're just not very good at taking it to the next level, making it commercial. So you mentioned in some of your explanation your finance background. You know fintech. Where does the finance side of you know investment, vcs and all that stuff? How does that fit into Atom? Can you, yes, give us a little bit of that?

Speaker 1:

you know, the initial idea is I wanted to bring capital to ideas, right. So that's kind of the big thing, because companies have capital, they have money uh, money to spend, money to do marketing, they have channels to distribute and then ideas are sitting there and the big difference of like doing a LinkedIn, let's say, where I show faces of engineers and I try to do matchmaking this way to Atom, is that actually Atom. The matchmaking happens with their inventions. So the patent itself is what you're finding. So you find first the idea and then the startup or the innovator who created it. You find first the idea and then the startup or the innovator who created it. Right, so you're actually finding ideas first of all, not people, which is a bit of a different matchmaking solution than many other you know, recruiting websites or LinkedIn or like collaboration websites Generally you look for a person. Instead. Here you're actually finding an idea and you're finding exactly the idea that fits your problem, like whatever you want to solve.

Speaker 1:

Then, on the finance side, what I am very excited about is that, if you want patents that are ideas are a bit hard to value. It's very hard to say this patent is worth X or Y, because first of all, it might be a different value for one company to another. It could be much more valuable for a company than for another one. And then, secondly, it's all very abstract because it's not commercial yet, so you don't know how much you're going to sell that product, how much revenue is going to bring you.

Speaker 1:

But because of my financial background, I've managed to put together a group of advisors, really talented financial engineers, who are helping me find ways to value these patents so that it can create a better sense of the cost involved in creating these partnerships and how much capital the companies need to take out to invest in the idea.

Speaker 1:

Or also, on the innovation side, if somebody is coming up with a new idea, they can go search how much ideas similar in the space have been sold for or licensed for and have an idea of how their idea and have an idea of how much their patent will be worth. And so this is something that will take a few years to make it really good, but it's something we are working on in the background, and I think it's the part that it's more exciting to me because, as you can imagine, intangible assets these are what they're called patents are very hard to create a value against yeah, so what I really want to do is make sure that the inventor gets credited for its idea, not only in terms of his name, but but also in terms of the money that they can perceive out of it.

Speaker 2:

Got it, got it. I love that capital to ideas phrase you used earlier. That's very good. I like to make notes when people are saying things, because I've got a short term memory and I forget stuff. You know, you're also alluding to what sounds to me a bit like Shark Tank or Dragon's Den. You're basically giving people the opportunity digitally, through this platform, to present something where someone says, aha, I know a total opportunity market, a total addressable market that this solution will present and I know that's worth this amount of money or that amount of money. Yeah, no, look, the more you explain it, the more I like it and it's exciting. Tell me, let's understand patents a bit more. So let's just let me go into a fantasy moment for a minute. I've invented something. I go and register a patent for it. There's a patent office somewhere and there's a document I have to do. I have to pay someone money for that um, and you can get a european patent. I guess sort of can you get, do people?

Speaker 1:

just get a global us patent, global patent.

Speaker 2:

So what's to stop someone stealing the idea if you haven't got a patent in their territory? You know whether it's North America, asia, wherever?

Speaker 1:

yes, so actually it's interesting because so, once you have an idea, you write research around it, then you get lawyers to write the documents that goes to be submitted to one patent office, and first you usually do it in your local patent office, so it could be like the UK or, if you're in Portugal, portuguese, right and then once that process starts going through, so once it gets filed, then it's kind of you're starting the protection period, right.

Speaker 1:

So it's something where, and for one year and a half, this information, though, stays private, so nobody can see or find it right and it's the time that the offices give you to sort of finalize on your idea of the research, because maybe you've put it like a preliminary patent inside. Then after that gets published, and there is where you start publishing it on multiple places. So you bring it from Portugal or London or just the US to all the markets where you think you want to be protected from, and actually you don't have to protect yourself globally. But obviously if you think it's very well worth it, you will. It's expensive because you have to pay fees in every patent office to keep their protection how much?

Speaker 2:

what, what's? What are we talking about?

Speaker 1:

no, it's a few thousand euros, but okay, yeah, but multiply it by the number of countries want to cover um, and then, once you, then a process starts where the patent office responsible will check your patent and do something which is called prior art. So it checks that your idea is actually innovative enough to have a patent and that there's nothing in the in like either conferences in research or in other patents that already has been like patented, so that that you can't you're actually copying something that is already exists.

Speaker 1:

So you're trying to show how innovative it is, and this goes back and forth for multiple years until then you get your patent granted. But what is is interesting is that at university level very often they put a lot of patents in that are still pending and they find companies to work with them even before the patent gets fully granted, because ideas move so fast and also companies are now moving so fast, so they want to sort of grab on to this innovation as fast as possible, even before the patent gets granted.

Speaker 2:

Right.

Speaker 1:

But as long as it's published. It means it's like you're kind of taking up that little space, so you're saying this is my space of this, my idea that covers this and this, and so nobody else can then sort of do exactly the same thing.

Speaker 2:

Yeah and well, thank you for that description, cause I did. I definitely didn't know some of that. Can I ask about timing? You know, over time I know in music copyright for for songs et cetera lapses after, I think it's 50 years. So is there a similar timeline for patent? So it's 20 years? Is that all 20 years? Wow. So your tool would it reveal perhaps lots of patents that have lapsed that a company could look at and think, ah, this is the missing part of our jigsaw. We didn't know someone had done this work and and clearly proved something. We now match this to what we've already got and make a complete thing. It could that be something yeah, that's, that's definitely possible.

Speaker 1:

What happens, though, is that often lapse patents. There's like something like in papers, where patents get cited, so like a new patent will say OK, I've developed something a bit further from the one before and I've developed something new, and so it like cites it, and so you can actually see the progress that has happened by one patent to the other. So it's very hard that like an older patent. But you know examples like penicillin, or like you know like medicines that were invented in the early pre-war time or during the war that now you find like there, you know multiple brands that have it right. So this is like examples that way. So it means that the patent timing has elapsed, and so that the one single company can't hold that got it itself, got it I.

Speaker 2:

I know one of the famous cases. You'll know it too, of course. Probably most people listening will um, when, um tim berners-lee developed hypertext markup language, html, which is basically the language of the Internet, and basically made it open source, he didn't register a patent for it. Yeah, I mean, I guess if he had, he might have made quite a bit of money, I would guess.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, so there is a bit of a battle around patenting versus open source. You can see it also with AI models now.

Speaker 2:

Yes, yes, some people want them to be closed.

Speaker 1:

Some people want them to be open source and generally software. For the last 20 years, where you can see the big billion-dollar companies have been mostly software-based. The concept was that most everything was because software moves so fast and changes so quickly was all open source and therefore people companies prefer to have trade secrets instead of patents, because actually when you have a patent, some information you have to make it public. Instead trade secrets like the Coca-Cola famous Coca-Cola ingredient mix is a trade secret, so they never have to publish anything about it to protect it, right. But then it's kind of coming back to an era, with the emergence of climate tech and space and energy, where things are more hardware-based and, as you know very well because you work in this space, hardware takes a lot more time to develop from an idea to a product and that's why patents generally exist, because you want to protect your idea before you start investing in bringing it to market.

Speaker 1:

Because, otherwise, you have an idea and then you're protecting it, and if you don't protect it, somebody else can come and do it as well, but you've started investing a lot of money into it. So, generally, this is why patents exist to protect ideas, for the time it takes for them from an idea to go to a commercial product.

Speaker 2:

Got it. Now, one thing that occurred to me when I first saw you pop up on LinkedIn and I checked out what you did and I thought, oh, wow, that's pretty cool was the thought that can't you already do this with either Google, you know, for the longest time, or chat, gpt and all the other things? Why does it take a specialist tool, you know a very targeted proposition like Atom, focus purely on patents, to be something that works better than those general search engines, if you like.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, so actually Google has an API on patents, but it has very little data on each patent and chat, gpt and all those and the other AI tools. If you give them the specific data, will be able to summarize one single patent. But I believe and here it's more like a vision right now of how AI will develop so I don't know if this is the right one or not, but I believe this is going to be what's happening, which is that the AI models the big, large language models have been developed will kind of be like iOS and Android right, they're like systems in the bottom and so they will be always generic because they have to appeal to everyone, and there will be a lot of companies that can develop on some of the technology that has been done by the large language models on top, very specific, and so it will take some time to get all the data process it, and so we also don't only take patent data. We take a ton of other data of the market to try.

Speaker 1:

Our secret sauce is to try to get really good use cases out of a technology. So instead of like reading a patent about some kind of material, let's say, because you're in the space of electrical batteries, instead of just thinking there's a new material that gets invented, that's a technology, right. But if you don't know, or you're not from the space and you don't know that this was an invention, it's very hard for you to find it. With atom, what we've done is we made the model try and infer from the new material that's been created what uses it can have, and maybe one of them is to be put into batteries, right, and then another can be something completely different, right right and so we take out these use cases so that when a company is writing like what they need, maybe what they need is just a better alternative to lithium, let's say I'm just making, and so they're saying I want an alternative to lithium.

Speaker 1:

Let's say, and so they're saying I want an alternative to lithium that is still very good at conducting and has these kind of requirements. And then our patent comes up, because that's the work we've done in the background by trying to assess a technology which is what is written in a patent, with actually the real-time use cases, and we've fed the models, our model, with a lot of data, and it continues to grow this data as we add more information to it to make it extremely specific. And so that's why I think there's always going to be a need for differentiation, because the large language models have a great way of understanding documents, but if you don't specifically train them on a set of documents, they stay very generic.

Speaker 2:

I've got it. I've got it, I think, and that's a great in-depth explanation. So it seems to me, listening to what you said, you're blending artificial intelligence with human intelligence, you're contextualizing the situation, and it reminded me the way you're explaining it reminded me of that famous quote from Donald Rumsfeld some years ago, the American politician who said there are unknowns, there are unknown unknowns, and you don't know what you don't know. And I think being able to sift and sort and contextualize all of this and matchmake, yeah, I kind of get it. I think it's really exciting because when you think of the 8 billion people on the planet that we have today, let alone those that are no longer with us and you collate all of that intellect, all of that knowledge, you know vision, mission, purpose and, as you just explained, contextualize it and marry it together with the commercial reality you know investors and the like you find a home for it. Yeah, this, honestly, this is so exciting.

Speaker 2:

When I worked at Ricardo, which I was way out of my depth there, there were far too many clever people and, yeah, I really struggled there. To be honest, ultimately, I didn't make it, as it were, make the cut. Look, yeah, I think this thing of what has come before, what's around right now. How do we kind of help people connect and join up? I love it. And your phrase earlier on capital, two ideas. Oh well, do you use that in your website? Is that your turn of phrase?

Speaker 1:

In my pitches.

Speaker 2:

I love it, bernadette, so let's finish on that. Pitches and progress in your business. Anyone listening to this who's thinking OK, either I get a bit of it or I totally get it. What should they do next? How can they either help you, perhaps as an investor, to help you build the platform, to expand it, etc. People can reach out on LinkedIn. You mentioned LinkedIn. You and I both use LinkedIn, I think, reasonably well. What would you like? How would you like people to help you from this point onwards, bernadette?

Speaker 1:

So for me because we've just started, as you can imagine the best thing is for people who are sitting in the heads of innovation, heads of strategy teams of like medium-sized to large-sized companies that are always looking for new technology to try it out. So go to atomgroupai and put a search in log in, play around with the patents they find and then send us some feedback so either through an email or through my LinkedIn, and see if we can actually find something that for them can be relevant, because for us that's the biggest opportunity that we're trying to create. So if we are helpful for these teams, then it means we are on the right track. And also as we develop the product further. Today we have the product that is mostly a search and match tool, but we want to add all these other information, like the valuation, the ability to do a very fast contract between the two parties and sort of seamlessly make the connection and sort of the agreement happen, so that it all works faster and we also cut some costs in the process If we can help all along the way.

Speaker 1:

That can only be done through the feedback that we get from the industry, who knows how to do these deals way better than myself. So, yes, as you, I feel like I'm the dumbest one in the room when I'm sitting around these great people. But what I'm really trying to do is to facilitate the connection, and I do think that today, like with all we've been achieved on the digital world, these connections still happen very locally and very offline, and if we can bring it online, it just means that, like, the head of strategy of a company in India can actually find a really interesting patent in Spain, and they don't even, they would never even get connected. So what we're trying to do is actually make the world a little bit smaller in terms of innovation.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I love the way you explain things, bernadette. You know, make the world a little bit smaller, make these interactions organic, if you like. And yeah, your earlier answer, this thing of blending artificial intelligence with human intelligence, ai and HI I think that's what I like most about what you're doing. So, look, thank you for sharing your story so far. I can't believe you've not even been doing it a year and you've already progressed to this point. There's a wonderfully easy to use website up and running. I'm going to keep you know, as you suggested. Others do sort of playing with that and having a look at that, because I'm sure it's going to stimulate and trigger some some ideas myself. So, thank you for doing it. First and foremost, thank you for doing what you're doing and sharing your time today explaining it, and I'm sure we're going to catch up again and maybe bump into each other in person sometime. That would be lovely too, bernadette.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I would love that. Thank you, roger, for having me on your podcast. I've been following you and seeing what you do and I think it's really important and I actually think that you know, talking about these things is the first part to really making a difference in the world and in the climate battle to get a bit more of electrical energy instead of just the fuel-based one.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, well, that's the ambition. We want to make everything electric for the right reasons, so we can democratize energy, democratize mobility. We can make the world a better place, not just for people who've got a bit of privilege and money, but but for everybody. And maybe that is um idealistic, um. It's like in the john lennon song, isn't it? Imagine all the people, um, but, but let's imagine, because imagine is a good thing to do, and that's that the heart of what we've just been talking about patents, patents and inventions. That's all about imagination. So maybe a nice way to finish.

Speaker 1:

Perfect. Thank you so much.

Speaker 2:

Thanks a lot, Bernadette. I'll put some links into this so people can find out more about you. You've already referenced the website, etc. But yeah, good luck and have a great 2025. Thank you, Roger. You too Looking forward to a great 2025.

Speaker 1:

Thank you, Roger. You too Looking forward to catching up again. Thank you.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, that's great. Okay, so, so we're talking. Thanks for listening to the show and make sure you follow Roger on LinkedIn, where you'll discover almost all there is to know about the spectacular electric vehicle revolution.

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