Daniel Ruskin began his career when he was a mere 14 years old as an engineer for Coinbase.
As he informs it, he was a teen who knew how to code and wished to build cool things.Obviously too young to get a checking account, Ruskin did independent advancement work he found on reddit in exchange for bitcoin.
There he saw that Coinbase was working with, and boldly sent the head of operations a cold e-mail asking if he might work for the crypto exchange.Long story short, I wound up composing much of the early software that powered the Coinbase platform, he informs A Technology NewsRoom.
I didnt write the v0 codebasebut I did write a lot of software that brought us from 1 to 10.
After four years at Coinbase, Ruskin decided to go to college and then to law school.
He began a few start-ups along the way, consisting of an election security company where he prepared and won a patent on its technology.Frustrated with how opaque the patent procedure was, Ruskin in December 2024 launched a brand-new Salt Lake City-based company called Inventex.Ruskin, now 26, says Inventex wishes to alleviate the process of preparing and filing patent applications by utilizing a series of AI agents enhanced by certified lawyers.
He believes that Inventex can help companies get patent-pending 10x faster in days, rather than months that a conventional firm may take.The idea quickly brought in financiers and after simply one month, Ruskin had actually raised $2.4 million in a pre-seed round to grow Inventex.
Conviction Capital, Coinbase co-founder Fred Ehrsam, and Cambrian Ventures co-led the funding, which also consisted of participation from Boost and others.
The money was raised through SAFEs at a $10 million valuation.Inventex intakes the required technical information supplied by its customers such as code, style documents, and technical specifications.
It then determines what its consumers have invented that meet the legal requirements for patentability.
This includes searching for prior art or what has actually been done before in that particular clients technical field, in addition to how our consumer is different, Ruskin said.The company then prepares and files patent applications on behalf of the company in the United States and abroad.Maksim Stepanenko, who worked with Ruskin at Coinbase, tells A Technology NewsRoom that Ruskin remarkably started leading essential payments infrastructure tasks at the crypto company right after he started while still a high school trainee.
When he heard about what Ruskin was doing with Inventex, he signed on as a small angel investor as part of the pre-seed financing.Hes thoughtful, fast-moving, and abnormally great at navigating complex systems, said Stepanenko, who is the creator of a startup called Operator.
Ive been following his work ever since [dealing with him at Coinbase] and was delighted to support his new business.
[Hes] one of the most silently remarkable people Ive worked with.More inbound than we can handleBesides speed, Ruskin declares Inventexs approach gets its customers higher-quality patents too.We tweak models specifically to each technical location, and our agents are true specialists in each technical field our customers work in, he said.
Traditional patent lawyers, Ruskin thinks, often do not comprehend the contours of the developments they are safeguarding.
The technical-expert representatives are supervised, and refined, by licensed attorneys.Ruskin is positive that Inventex has the ideal model to be innovative in this complex subset of legal services.Our rivals offer software application as task-based automation to standard law firms, and implementation is constrained by their incentives such as a billable-hour model, and the wider scheme of paying for knowledge versus outcomes, he stated.
We overthrow this by providing the end-to-end service.Inventexs model is also generalizable, Ruskin claims.
He stated Inventex is presently using one of its tools to automate MSPB (United States Merit Systems Protection Board) complaints for the tens of thousands of federal staff members that were recently laid off.Traditional firms cant assistance that kind of work, he said.Its early days yet however Inventex has about $250,000 of annual recurring revenue in the pipeline, according to Ruskin, consisting of two openly traded business and many start-ups.
Dirac is one that has actually given permission to be named.We have more inbound than we can manage, Ruskin said.Building unicornsRuskin also has proficiency in the fintech area.
He joined Checkr, a service for gig platforms to pay their labor force, in 2022.
There, Ruskin states, he assisted start Checkr Pay, a startup within a start-up.
Throughout his time there, Ruskin hired a team of 3 engineers and constructed and introduced a neobank in about three to 4 months.
(Checkr raised $250 million at a $4.6 billion evaluation in 2021.) Ruskin left that company in 2023 to complete law school at New York University, where he finished in the top 10% of his class in 2024.
It was during his time at Checkr Pay that Ruskin learnt more about Cambrian Ventures solo GP Rex Salisbury, who explained the young entrepreneur as the business greatest speed engineer.Ask the early Coinbase group and theyll inform you the exact same thing, which is quite remarkable given he was still in high school, Salisbury told A Technology NewsRoom.
Daniel assisted build 2 unicorns (Coinbase and Checkr) before graduating college and has given that gone on to graduate law school and pass the patent bar.
[Hes a] pretty rare combination of talent.He added: At this early phase, you do not examine a business purely on what it is, however on what it can be.Its currently exceptional what Daniel has constructed, but offered his speed what really excites me is how rapidly hes carried out to develop more.Making patents more accessibleInventex has actually grown 2x per month since December mainly through word-of-mouth referrals and collaborations with VCs.
The company charges clients a monthly charge to develop a patent portfolio.
The charge consists of invention discovery, preparing, filing, and patent prosecution.Presently, it has three full-time workers (all engineers) and several agreement patent attorneys.Inventexs closest competitors are patent drafting tools like Edge and Solve, according to Ruskin.Before Inventex, Ruskin established Motif in July 2024, which had the exact same idea, however with a co-founder that didnt work out.Looking ahead, Ruskin is thinking about using Inventexs drafting toolkit as a white-labeled item for law office so they can accredit its tools to get their customers better patents, faster.This lines up with our long-lasting vision for the field of patent law.
Now, 90% of the billable time for an initial patent filing is spent on preparing a disclosure; 10% is invested on strategy, he said.
This will turn in 5 years drafting will take 10% of the time, and technique will be the differentiated service provided by firms.
This ultimately brings the expense to file a patent down, and makes the system more available to innovators of any size.