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Client story · Fractional Chief IP Officer

Position Imaging: a US technology powerhouse.

The patents were an asset on paper. The position’s job was to turn them into a product that earns.

What the position owned

Not advice. Ownership.

Patent strategy

Responsibility for the overall direction of the portfolio, what it protects, what it is worth and where it goes next.

Productising the IP

Packaged the patents into something a buyer can license, price and say yes to.

Licensing worldwide

Took that product to companies around the world instead of leaving it in a filing cabinet.

The company

What Position Imaging actually does.

Position Imaging is a New Hampshire technology company that has spent nearly two decades on one hard problem: knowing exactly where things are. Its systems combine computer vision and radio-frequency signals, interpreted by machine learning, to track packages and assets with high precision. Founded in 2006 by Ned Hill, the company began in image-guided applications and pivoted its positioning technology into logistics, where the problem pays.

Two products carry the business today. The Smart Package Room gives apartment buildings, campuses and offices a camera-guided room that manages resident deliveries without lockers or staff. iPickup does the same for retail: unmanned pickup points for online orders, launched with UPS in the UK in 2023.

The market

Package volume keeps climbing and the last fifty feet, from building door to the right pair of hands, is still mostly manual. Property managers pay to end package-room chaos; retailers pay to hand over online orders without queues or counter staff. Underneath both sits the asset that brought this company into our portfolio of client stories: a patent estate deep enough that in October 2023 the company raised $30 million in financing secured against the IP itself, from GT Investment Partners.

The business, on one page

The canvas.

Customers

Multifamily property managers, college campuses and offices for the Smart Package Room; retailers and carriers for iPickup pickup points.

Value proposition

Deliveries and pickups that run themselves, no lockers, no counter staff, guided by cameras and tracking that know where every item sits.

Channels & partners

Direct sales to property groups plus carrier and technology partners, including the UPS-backed unmanned pickup launch in the UK.

Revenue

Hardware plus recurring software for package rooms and pickup points, sold to properties and retailers.

Key resources

The patent portfolio spanning vision and RF tracking, the machine-learning stack on top of it, and two decades of positioning R&D.

Cost structure

Engineering-heavy R&D, hardware deployment and support, balanced against IP that can finance the company between equity rounds.

The position’s default plays

What a great Chief IP Officer does in a company like this.

01Reads the claims, not the titles. A portfolio is what its claims cover, not what its patent titles suggest. Every licensing conversation starts from claim language that has actually been read.
02Prices the portfolio in dollars. Position Imaging’s IP secured $30M of financing. That only happens when someone has done the work of valuing the estate as an asset a lender can underwrite.
03Clusters patents into products. Sixty-plus grants are not one thing, they are families that map to different industries. Clustered and packaged, each family becomes something a licensee can buy the right to use.
04Finds the licensees, then sells. Licensing revenue is a sales job: mapping who builds close to the claims, approaching them with evidence, structuring tiers. Filing more patents is not a strategy; deals are.
05Watches the field around the core. Every new filing near the company’s claims is either a threat to block or a licensee to approach. A great IP operator sees them the week they publish, not years later.

Coverage

Years of venture capital built this technology. The IP position exists to make the patents pay it back.

Let’s get on a call

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**Georgina King***Executive Partnership Manager*

mCards: the branded payments and rewards platform

The position behind it

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