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Patents ownership will be sorted out early in the Orizon venture fund at OREF.

2 Mar 2025 · 0 min

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In this brief dialogue, two speakers discuss the importance of addressing patentability, freedom‑to‑operate, and exit strategy considerations early in the Orizon venture fund process. Speaker A asks how patentability and freedom‑to‑operate are balanced, noting that these assessments can occur either early or later. Speaker B explains that the fund strives to resolve these issues upfront—defining exit strategies, clarifying how intellectual property will be handled, and ensuring all parties share the same expectations before any investment is made. The conversation emphasizes making weighted decisions that benefit both inventors and the fund, and questions whether such IP considerations are contingent on the application’s acceptance.

How about the sort of, how are you balancing patentability and freedom to operate? Sometimes they're done very early to evaluate if someone is going to work with an inventor, and sometimes they're sort of pushed later on.
We try to get as much upfront figured out as possible. I mean, Colleen was talking about the exit strategy. That's something that is discussed upfront as well. Again, if we're going to be investing in an idea, we want to make sure that everybody's on the same page and has the same expectations. And as much as we can put those upfront— exit strategy, the way that the IP will be handled— and then we make a weighted decision on, you know, something that Is good for the inventors, is something good for us, is it does, and is this viable?
So are those things sort of conditional to the application being accepted?
I think that that's all work. That's all worked out during the, what I'll call the pitch development phase, which is early on. So, and that's all done before, certainly before decisions are made on the actual writing a check to funding them.