Building an IP Roadmap in the First 90 Days After a Funding Round

A funding round creates two pressures at once. The company is expected to move faster, and the work it produces becomes more visible to competitors. Those pressures pull in opposite directions, which is why the quarter after a close is the right time to set an intellectual property plan rather than improvise one.

Days 1 to 30: know what exists

Before deciding what to file, establish the baseline. That means a list of every filing, trademark, and documented trade secret, plus the assignment records behind them. It also means an honest note about what is not covered. Most teams find at least one significant gap in this step, and finding it now is far cheaper than finding it during the next diligence process.

Days 31 to 60: decide what is worth protecting

Not everything should be filed. The useful filter is commercial rather than technical. For each candidate, ask three things.

• Would a competitor need this to compete effectively with us?
• Could a competitor detect that we are using it, or would infringement be invisible?
• Will this still matter in five years, or is it tied to a version of the product that will be gone?

The second question is the one teams underuse. Work that cannot be detected from the outside is often better held as a trade secret than published in an application. Our guide on trade secrets versus patents goes deeper on that tradeoff.

Days 61 to 90: build the operating rhythm

A roadmap that lives in a slide deck does not survive contact with a growth quarter. What survives is process embedded in work that already happens.

• An invention review attached to the release cycle
• Assignment language built into every offer letter and contractor agreement
• A docket owner, named, with calendar reminders for deadlines
• A written trade secret policy covering access, offboarding, and vendor handling
• A quarterly thirty minute review with leadership rather than an annual scramble

Budgeting without guessing

Costs vary widely by technology area and filing strategy, so any figure quoted in the abstract is close to useless. What holds across companies is the shape of the spend. Early activity concentrates in search and drafting. Prosecution costs arrive later and are spread over years. International filings, if pursued, tend to be the largest single decision point. Planning around that shape is more useful than planning around a number.

The companies that get real value from a round are rarely the ones that filed the most. They are the ones that decided early what mattered and then executed that decision consistently.