About SlingIP
Patent harvesting for technical founders.
Most patent attorneys spend their first 6–10 hours of a new engagement reading what you wrote, hunting for prior art, and triaging which inventions are worth filing — before a single claim has been drafted. Taking an invention from first disclosure all the way to a filed application runs 19–25 attorney hours, about $10,000–$20,000 at typical rates, which is why most early-stage teams never file at all.
SlingIP does that pre-work upfront. Drop in your pitch deck, architecture docs, and code. Inside 90 founder-minutes you get a ranked Invention Value Assessment Portfolio: 5–25 candidates with prior-art checks, claim sketches, and the trade-offs your attorney would surface anyway. Hand it over — that reading-and-triage step drops from 6–10 hours to about 2.
That 2-hour figure is the reading-and-triage step only, not an engagement’s total attorney hours. Roughly 5 attorney hours to review the pre-packaged SlingIP deliverable — the ranked candidates, prior-art register, and flags — and to prepare the filing decision. This estimate covers review of the packaged materials only; it does not include independent prior-art searching, independent verification of the register, additional legal analysis, or claim drafting, which are separate. See the full cost breakdown.
Why we built it
Founders shouldn’t learn patent law during a §102(b) bar.
We watched too many seed-to-Series-B companies discover patent strategy ten months into a CES demo year — with the disclosure clock already ticking. By the time counsel is engaged, the cheap decisions (provisional now vs. utility later, which inventions to keep as trade secrets) have effectively been made by inaction.
The fix isn’t more attorney hours. It’s pre-work that arrives the moment you start asking the question. SlingIP makes the first read of your portfolio cost a fixed fee instead of an open- ended hourly meter, and produces something an attorney can actually use as their starting draft.
Principles
How we operate.
Your inventions stay yours.
Engagement-scoped at the database layer, contractual no-training guarantees, and an audit trail you can hand to outside counsel. Patent material is the most sensitive data in a technical company — we treat it that way.
Counsel-first by design.
Every output is structured the way your attorney already reads — element-grounded claims, prior-art chips with USPTO links, §101 / §102 / §103 reasoning. We make the attorney's first hour faster, not theirs to bill.
Honest hedges, not hype.
We don't claim a patent is granted, only that an invention looks novel against the references our search reaches. Every confidence number ties to a citation. When a question is open, we tell you it's open.
Founder voice, attorney content.
The IVAP reads as a founder narrative — what you built, why it matters, what to do about it. The PRP underneath is everything the attorney needs in their structured language. Two audiences, one document.
Team
A small team. Ecosystem-rooted.
SlingIP is a small founding team with backgrounds across deep-tech engineering, applied AI, and patent workflows. We work alongside founders heading into accelerator and VC due diligence — where defensible IP shows up early.
Patent counsel of record on every engagement is a registered patent agent or attorney; SlingIP is not a law firm and the IVAP is not legal advice. See the full scope.
Ready to see what your competitive moat looks like?
The preliminary scan is free. Two documents in, a one-page snapshot out, inside 24 hours.