Identifying Licensing Opportunities in NLPatent

NLPatent uses natural language processing (NLP) to help you search efficiently and uncover potential licensing opportunities. With AI-driven relevance ranking and intuitive filters, it's easy to surface applicants and assignees working in related technology areas—helping you identify prospects for partnerships, licensing, or competitive intelligence.

Starting Your Search

The right approach will depend on your specific use case. Whether you're investigating a single patent or surveying a broader tech landscape, NLPatent supports both direct and exploratory search workflows. With either scenario, we would recommend setting the maximum search results to 500.

Option 1: Start with a Patent Number. If you’re working from a specific patent, use the Patent Number search to find related documents. This is useful for identifying other companies publishing in a similar space—potential licensing targets or collaborators.

Option 2: Start with a Technology Area If you’re exploring a broader technology field, use a natural language query to describe the area of interest.

Finding Potential Licensees

Identifying potential licensees is an iterative process. You’ll often need to apply, remove, and re-apply filters as your understanding of the landscape evolves. We recommend starting with these filters:

Filing Date: Limit results to the last 20 years to focus on relevant and recent filings

Assignee: Exclude your own organization to highlight external portfolios.

Once your initial results load, scan the list of assignees to identify organizations that appear frequently. If, for example, Bristol Myers Squibb shows up often, apply an Assignee filter to explore their full patent portfolio.

From there:

Use Relevance Analysis and/or Ask NLPatent to understand the key features in their patents.
Look for features that are missing or underrepresented in their portfolio—these gaps may represent licensing opportunities.
Save any patents of interest.
Repeat this process with other assignees to continue building your list of potential leads.

If your organization uses NLPatent Monitor, you may also want to set up alerts to track future publications from these companies or to catch relevant new prior art as it emerges.

Finding strong licensing opportunities takes exploration, iteration, and a bit of pattern recognition. NLPatent is built to support that process—giving you the tools to surface relevant patents, understand their features quickly, and identify gaps in competitor portfolios.