AI can copy what you built.
It cannot copy what you own.

It is the legal ownership of something you created rather than something you can physically hold. It comes in four main forms. A patent covers how something works and lets you stop others using that method for around twenty years. A trade mark covers your name and logo. A registered design covers how a product looks. A trade secret covers valuable information you keep confidential, such as a dataset, a recipe or a process.

Yes, and the effect has been measured. The European Patent Office and the EU Intellectual Property Office studied European startups in a joint report published in October 2023. Companies that had applied for both patents and trade marks were 3.5 times more likely to raise seed funding, the first professional round, and 10.2 times more likely to raise Series A or Series B funding, the rounds that follow, than companies with no intellectual property at all.

It works through the numbers a buyer or an investor looks at. Ocean Tomo's 2025 study found that around 92% of the combined value of the 500 largest listed US companies now sits in things you cannot touch, such as brands, software, data and patents, compared with 17% in 1975. And a study of more than 127,000 European companies found those owning intellectual property earn 20% more revenue per employee than those that do not, rising to 68% more for small and medium sized companies and 98% for those holding patents, trade marks and registered designs together.

The same 2023 European study found that companies which had applied for patents or trade marks were more than twice as likely to be acquired or to float on a stock market. Trade marks alone put companies at 2.1 times, patents alone at 2.4 times, and holding both at 3.2 times.

Usually more than founders expect. Computer technology is now the largest single field of patenting in the world, at 13.2% of all filings, according to WIPO's World Intellectual Property Indicators 2025. Where a patent is not available, the thing worth owning is normally the training data, the test set, the way you process data, your method of adapting a model to a task, your customer usage data or your brand. Those are protected by keeping them confidential, by contract, and by trade marks rather than by a patent.

It depends on what you showed publicly and when. In most countries a patent has to be applied for before the idea is made public. A public demonstration, a conference talk, a pitch deck sent without a confidentiality agreement or a published code repository can permanently remove your right to patent whatever was shown. Anything you never made public can still be protected, and in the United States there is a limited grace period after disclosure. The order of work is: stop the leak, then apply, then license.

Biotechnology applies the most in Europe, with 48% of startups applying for a patent and 47% for a trade mark. Science and engineering, healthcare and manufacturing all sit around 40%. But the largest measured benefit appears in ordinary, low technology industries, where small companies that applied for a European patent were 172% more likely to enter a period of high growth, against 110% in high technology industries. The benefit is bigger there because almost nobody in those industries files.

No, and nothing on this page is legal advice. We do not file or prosecute applications. We place senior operators who decide what is worth owning and what it should earn, then bring specialist lawyers in to do the filing. If there is nothing worth doing, we tell you that on the first call.