Sakari Arvela

Sakari Arvela is co-founder of IPRally, a company in Helsinki, Finland, that makes an AI search engine for patents. He was its CEO from 2018 until May 2024, when Dennis van der Veeke took over as CEO and Arvela became chief product officer, according to an IPRally announcement.

A patent attorney who saw a pattern

Before IPRally, Arvela worked for more than ten years as a European patent attorney. He noticed that much of the searching and analysis followed the same steps every time. “I realized the work I was doing was following the same pattern over and over again and I thought that this could be something a machine could do,” he told Spintop Ventures.

Two years on the graph idea

IPRally turns each patent into a knowledge graph of its parts and how they connect, then searches by comparing graphs. Arvela worked on the idea alone before he started the company with Juho Kallio, now chief technology officer. “We founded IPRally in April 2018, after one year of bootstrapping and proof-of-concepting with my co-founder and CTO Juho Kallio,” he told TechCrunch in 2021. “Before that, I had digested the graph approach myself for about two years and collected the courage to start the venture”.