François-Xavier Leduc

François-Xavier Leduc is co-founder and CEO of DeepIP, a company with offices in New York and Paris, France, that makes AI software for patent drafting and prosecution. He started it in 2024 with Edouard d’Archimbaud, who is chief technology officer.

Kili Technology first

Leduc and d’Archimbaud built Kili Technology together starting in 2018. Kili makes data labeling software that companies use to prepare training data for AI models, and its clients include Airbus, IBM, and SAP. The two then turned to patents, where applications are still drafted largely by hand and attorneys spend hours turning claims and drawings into long, formal documents.

A system for the whole patent life

Leduc says early AI tools for patent attorneys sped up single tasks without connecting them. “The first wave of AI in patent practice focused on speeding up individual tasks,” he wrote on the DeepIP blog. “But patent work is cumulative. It spans years, teams, decisions…We built DeepIP to be the system where that work lives, with AI embedded throughout the workflow so professionals don’t have to manage fragmentation or carry context manually.”

He told Tech Funding News that firms picked it up fast. “The product-market fit was almost immediate,” he said.