IP & Patent Portfolio Management
The buyer population — Lessors of non-financial intangible assets (except copyrighted works)
Base industry report for 533 →- Establishments · CanadaA
- 554
- Under 10 employeesA
- 63%
- Establishments · USA
- 2,729
- Employment · USA
- 39,529
- Payroll · USA
- $5.3B
Of 554 Canadian establishments with employees, 63% have fewer than ten — mostly small operators. Each of those is one potential account, before any filter for size or fit.
Entry signal — what decides who wins here
One thing must be trueEntry turns on a single condition that can be named and tested before much is spent. Clear it and this becomes an execution question; fail it and no amount of operating skill helps.
Displace an incumbent the screen found well defended — payments attached to the workflow, data that does not leave, a contract that renews itself. Share here means giving a buyer a reason to break something that currently works, which is a higher bar than being better.
Measured, not forecast: the share of US establishments opening in one year that were still active later. It counts good operators and bad ones together, which is exactly why it is the honest answer to “what are the odds”. It is for the whole sector rather than this market, and the ten-year figure comes from an older cohort because no younger one has reached ten years.
This is not a probability of success, and it is not a verdict on you. No survival probability is published per market, and inventing one would be worse than saying so. What the bar reads is how much of the outcome sits inside an operator's control: green means the hurdles are ones a better operator clears, red means the binding constraint is capital, an asset or a permission rather than execution. Someone arriving with an advantage this screen did not assume can win a market shown in red.
Companies named in this market · 5
The binding constraint — incumbent vulnerability
Renewal fees pay for the software. Anaqua and CPA Global both earn on the annuity payments they administer, so the management platform can be priced at or below cost — the same attach economics as payments in the salon and nonprofit records, with a larger per-customer float. Selling the software alone means selling against free.
The incumbent
Who owns this market and who is coming for it. Fields a screen never reached say so rather than guessing.
Financials & market size — sourced
Figures that came from a filing, a results release or reputable reporting, each carrying its evidence tier.
Market size, derived
Built from the competitor set upward rather than quoted from a forecast. Published TAMs in these categories are frequently reverse-engineered from each other, so any published figure is checked against the vendor arithmetic rather than trusted on its own.
Disclosed revenue from 1 of 3 named vendors. The market is at least this large.
No vendor has both a disclosed revenue and a published share.
Only a revenue floor is known — the true market is larger by whatever the undisclosed vendors earn.
Competitor set · 3 named · 1 disclose revenue
| Name | Revenue | Share | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
| Clarivate (incl. CPA Global)NYSE: CLVTA | $2.5B | — | FY2025 total revenue — IP, academia and life sciences together, far broader than IP management software |
| AnaquaC | not disclosed | — | Private (Nordic Capital); no disclosure |
| Questel / Dennemeyer / PatSnapC | not disclosed | — | Private; no disclosure |
Evidence
Evidence. Incumbent financials on this record ARE sourced (tier A/B, see the financials block). The cut factor and reasoning remain analyst judgment and were not tested against customers.
Where the industry talks
The associations, forums and events where people in this trade actually talk shop — where to listen before entering, and where the first customers are found. Each link was opened on the date shown.
'more than 1,900 members' per About page: patent/trademark agents, IP lawyers, in-house counsel
Main US IP-law association; includes a Law Practice Management committee; no member count on site
Trade association of in-house IP owners (corporations and law firms); site gives inconsistent size figures so none recorded
'more than 6,700 organizations from 167 jurisdictions' per About page; the trademark side of portfolio management
Subscription trade title on IP as a business asset; runs the IPBC event series
IAM's flagship conference series for corporate IP leaders; several regional editions a year
Daily patent and IP law news and commentary site
Interview podcast on IP practice; episode 178 was the latest when checked
Licensing Executives Society USA & Canada (lesusacanada.org) is also live and relevant to licensing-side users. r/Patents could not be verified from this network.
The businesses it sells to
Operating-business records filed along the same branch of NAICS — the customers of this software, screened as businesses in their own right.