Daniel Ruskin began his profession when he was a mere 14 years previous as an engineer for Coinbase. As he tells it, he was a young person “who knew the best way to code and wished to construct cool issues.”
Clearly too younger to get a checking account, Ruskin did freelance growth work he discovered on reddit in change for bitcoin. There he noticed that Coinbase was hiring, and boldly despatched the pinnacle of operations a chilly e mail asking if he might work for the crypto change.
“Lengthy story quick, I ended up writing a lot of the early software program that powered the Coinbase platform,” he tells TechCrunch. “I didn’t write the v0 codebase…however I did write a variety of software program that introduced us from 1 to 10.”
After 4 years at Coinbase, Ruskin determined to go to school after which to regulation college. He began a couple of startups alongside the best way, together with an election safety firm the place he drafted and won a patent on its know-how.
Annoyed with how “opaque” the patent course of was, Ruskin in December 2024 launched a brand new Salt Lake Metropolis-based firm known as Inventex.
Ruskin, now 26, says Inventex needs to ease the method of “getting ready and submitting patent purposes” through the use of a collection of AI brokers augmented by licensed attorneys. He believes that Inventex will help firms get patent-pending “10x quicker” — in days, fairly than months {that a} conventional agency may take.
The idea shortly attracted traders and after only one month, Ruskin had raised $2.4 million in a pre-seed spherical to develop Inventex. Conviction Capital, Coinbase co-founder Fred Ehrsam, and Cambrian Ventures co-led the financing, which additionally included participation from Increase and others. The cash was raised through SAFEs at a $10 million valuation.
Inventex intakes the required technical knowledge supplied by its clients corresponding to code, design paperwork, and technical specs. It then identifies what its clients have invented that meet the authorized necessities for patentability. This consists of looking for prior artwork or what has been carried out earlier than in that exact buyer’s technical discipline, in addition to “how our buyer is totally different,” Ruskin stated.
The corporate then drafts and information patent purposes on behalf of the corporate in america and overseas.
Maksim Stepanenko, who labored with Ruskin at Coinbase, tells TechCrunch that Ruskin impressively began main key funds infrastructure initiatives on the crypto firm “quickly” after he began whereas nonetheless a highschool pupil. So when he heard about what Ruskin was doing with Inventex, he signed on as a small angel investor as a part of the pre-seed financing.
“He’s considerate, fast-moving, and unusually good at navigating advanced programs,” stated Stepanenko, who’s the founding father of a startup known as Operator. “I’ve been following his work ever since [working with him at Coinbase] and was excited to help his new firm. [He’s] one of the vital quietly spectacular folks I’ve labored with.”
‘Extra inbound than we will deal with’
In addition to velocity, Ruskin claims Inventex’s method will get its clients higher-quality patents too.
“We tremendous tune fashions particularly to every technical space, and our brokers are true consultants in every technical discipline our clients work in,” he stated. Conventional patent attorneys, Ruskin believes, usually don’t perceive the contours of the innovations they’re defending. The technical-expert brokers are overseen, and refined, by licensed attorneys.
Ruskin is assured that Inventex has the proper mannequin to be modern on this advanced subset of authorized providers.
“Our opponents promote software program as task-based automation to conventional regulation companies, and deployment is constrained by their incentives corresponding to a billable-hour mannequin, and the broader scheme of paying for experience versus outcomes,” he stated. “We upend this by offering the end-to-end service.”
Inventex’s mannequin can also be generalizable, Ruskin claims. For instance, he stated Inventex is at present utilizing one in every of its instruments to automate MSPB (U.S. Advantage Techniques Safety Board) complaints for the tens of hundreds of federal staff that have been not too long ago laid off.
“Conventional companies can’t help that type of workload,” he stated.
It’s early days but however Inventex has about $250,000 of annual recurring income within the pipeline, in accordance with Ruskin, together with two publicly traded firms and quite a few startups. Dirac is one which has given permission to be named.
“We’ve got extra inbound than we will deal with,” Ruskin stated.
Constructing unicorns
Ruskin additionally has experience within the fintech house. He joined Checkr, a service for gig platforms to pay their workforce, in 2022. There, Ruskin says, he helped begin Checkr Pay, “a startup inside a startup.” Throughout his time there, Ruskin employed a group of three engineers and “constructed and launched a neobank in about three to 4 months.” (Checkr raised $250 million at a $4.6 billion valuation in 2021.) Ruskin left that firm in 2023 to complete regulation college at New York College, the place he graduated within the high 10% of his class in 2024.
It was throughout his time at Checkr Pay that Ruskin bought to know Cambrian Ventures’ solo GP Rex Salisbury, who described the younger entrepreneur as the corporate’s “highest velocity engineer.”
“Ask the early Coinbase group they usually’ll inform you an identical factor, which is fairly outstanding given he was nonetheless in highschool,” Salisbury informed TechCrunch. “Daniel helped construct two unicorns (Coinbase and Checkr) earlier than graduating school and has since gone on to graduate regulation college and move the patent bar. [He’s a] fairly uncommon mixture of expertise.”
He added: “At this early stage, you don’t consider an organization purely on what it’s, however on what it may be. It’s already outstanding what Daniel has constructed, however given his velocity what actually excites me is how shortly he’s executed to construct extra.”
Making patents extra accessible
Inventex has grown 2x monthly since December primarily by word-of-mouth referrals and partnerships with VCs. The corporate costs clients a month-to-month payment to construct a patent portfolio. The payment consists of invention discovery, drafting, submitting, and patent prosecution.
Presently, it has three full-time staff (all engineers) and several other contract patent attorneys.
Inventex’s closest opponents are patent drafting instruments like Edge and Solve, in accordance with Ruskin.
Earlier than Inventex, Ruskin based Motif in July 2024, which had the identical idea, however with a co-founder that “didn’t work out.”
Wanting forward, Ruskin is contemplating providing Inventex’s drafting toolkit as a white-labeled product for regulation companies to allow them to license its instruments “to get their purchasers higher patents, quicker.”
“This aligns with our long-term imaginative and prescient for the sector of patent regulation. Proper now, 90% of the billable time for an preliminary patent submitting is spent on drafting a disclosure; 10% is spent on technique,” he stated. “This can flip in 5 years — drafting will take 10% of the time, and technique would be the differentiated service supplied by companies. This finally brings the fee to file a patent down, and makes the system extra accessible to innovators of any dimension.”