Paul Lee

Paul Lee is co-founder and CEO of Patlytics, a company in New York City that builds AI software for patent work, from drafting and prior art searches to infringement analysis and claim charts. He started it with Arthur Jen, its chief technology officer.

Waterloo, then venture capital

Lee and Jen became friends in 2010 at the University of Waterloo, where both studied engineering. Lee went into venture capital, while Jen built software and co-founded Magic, a crypto wallet company, as its chief technology officer. Both saw firsthand how a successful IP strategy could fuel innovation, and that shared view led to Patlytics.

The same problem, matter after matter

“For more than a decade in venture, I watched the same problem repeat,” Lee wrote in a post on the company's Series B. He described IP attorneys at top firms “stitching together disconnected tools to get through a single matter,” with every handoff manual and every stage rebuilt from scratch. “The subject matter was a company's most valuable asset. The software managing it was not built for the job.”