What Investors Tend to Ask About Your IP Before a Growth Round
By James Borzilleri | September 1, 2025 | Updated October 2026
By the time a company is raising a growth round, investors have usually stopped asking whether the product works. They want to know whether the advantage lasts. Intellectual property is one of the few places that question gets a written answer.
Every fund and diligence team is different, but the same themes come up often enough that it is worth preparing for them before the data room opens.
Who owns the technology?
Diligence teams commonly check that every employee and contractor who contributed to core systems signed an agreement assigning their work to the company. Gaps here are among the most common findings, and they are usually far easier to close before a deal than during one.
What have you filed, and why those things?
A list of application numbers is less persuasive than a short explanation of how each filing maps to the product and the roadmap. Investors tend to respond better to a small, deliberate portfolio than to a large one nobody can explain.
What is protected as a trade secret?
Many valuable assets should never be patented. If you rely on trade secrets, be ready to show how they are identified, who can access them and what controls are in place. An unrecorded secret is hard to defend and hard to value.
Are there known third-party risks?
Sophisticated investors may ask whether anyone has looked at third-party patents near your core features. A freedom-to-operate opinion is a legal document that only counsel can give, but a documented search and a plan for any concerns found shows the risk has been taken seriously.
What comes next?
The most useful answer to a moat question is a pipeline: inventions in preparation, new product and service concepts under evaluation, and a regular process for capturing what the engineering team builds. That tells an investor the advantage is being renewed rather than spent.
A short preparation checklist
Investors weigh many factors, and IP preparation alone will not decide a round. It does remove an avoidable source of delay and doubt.
- Confirm signed invention assignment agreements for all contributors to core systems.
- Prepare a one-page map linking each filing to a product or roadmap item.
- Write down your trade secret inventory and access controls.
- Summarize any third-party patent searches and how concerns were addressed.
- Describe your process for capturing and evaluating new inventions.
This article is general information, not legal, tax or investment advice. Idea Partnership is not a law firm and does not provide legal opinions. Patentability, inventorship, filing strategy and disclosure questions should be reviewed with licensed patent counsel for your specific facts.