Introducing Vainture Patent

University tech transfer offices process 100+ disclosures per year. For each one, the office runs two distinct gates: a commercialization gate owned by business development (should we spin this out?) and an IP gate owned by patent counsel (should we file?). The IP gate is structurally the most expensive question in the queue, because the §102(b) one-year bar makes it time-bounded. Late evaluation is not a budget problem; it is a forfeiture problem.

Until now, Vainture only spoke to the first gate. Vainture Signal scores commercialization viability across six dimensions in three minutes. Today we are introducing Vainture Patent, a patentability vetting engine that brings the same speed, evidence discipline, and structural rigor to the second gate.

Why now

Existing patent tools (DeepIP, Solve Intelligence, Patentext) are practitioner tools — they assist registered patent practitioners during drafting and prosecution. They are excellent at what they do. None of them vet disclosures before a practitioner is engaged.

That gap is where TTOs live. A disclosure arrives. The IP counsel has to decide, on limited information and against the clock, whether this is worth a §111(b) provisional, whether the claims are even defensible, and whether prior art will block what the inventor thinks is novel. The answer to "what does the prior art look like?" used to take days. Vainture Patent answers it in five minutes.

What Vainture Patent does

The flow is:

1. Disclosure intake — abstract, technical description, and any claims-of-interest. Same form as Signal.
2. Multi-source prior art retrieval — across USPTO ODP, EPO Espacenet, PubMed, Semantic Scholar, arXiv, Lens.org, and Google Patents (standby). Parallel adapters, ~5 minutes total.
3. Citation-gated relevance scoring — every prior art hit comes with the specific passage that supports its score. No vague "looks similar" outputs.
4. Patentability verdict — File as-is, File with narrowed claims, or Do not file. Backed by a deterministic 0–100 defensibility score with §102 anticipation and §103 obviousness risk mapped per claim.
5. Draft claims at three scope levels — broad / medium / narrow — plus a 150-word USPTO-format abstract.
6. Practitioner-ready DOCX handoff — TTO and Practitioner variants, both bearing the locked 37 CFR §1.56 candor footer.

The two-engine architecture

Vainture Signal (commercialization) and Vainture Patent (patentability) are independent specialist engines. A TTO can run either standalone or both in parallel against the same disclosure. The verdicts are independent on purpose: a disclosure can be highly defensible but commercially weak, or commercially obvious but patent-thin. The decisions are different. The teams are usually different. The engines are different.

A Synthesis Layer combining the two verdicts into a unified recommendation arrives in v1.1 — for the rooms where commercialization and patentability decisions are made together.

What we don't do

Transparency builds trust, particularly in patent work:

• We do not file patents. Every output routes to a registered patent practitioner of record.
• We do not draft the §112 specification. That is the practitioner's job. We give them claims, abstract, and prior art context to start from.
• We do not replace patent counsel. The §1.56 duty of candor remains with the practitioner.
• We do not advise on inventorship, especially for AI-assisted inventions. That is lawyer territory.

Vainture Patent is a vetting layer in front of the practitioner — not a replacement for one. The §1.56 candor footer on every output is not boilerplate; it is the design constraint.

Try it

If you sit at the IP gate of a research institution, start a Vainture Patent evaluation. If you sit at the commercialization gate, start a Vainture Signal evaluation. If both questions are open on the same disclosure, run them in parallel.