Unleashing the strategic value of patents
About Us
Cipher’s mission is to enable patent owners to make rational decisions by providing strategic patent intelligence, powered by machine learning.
We are part of the community that promotes the importance of patents as strategic assets that deliver value to an organisation. We provide Solutions to the strategic challenges facing patent owners.
On this page:
Our Story
Cipher was founded by Nigel Swycher (CEO) and Steve Harris (CTO) in 2013 to harness the latest developments in AI and machine learning to automate recognised inefficiencies in the aggregation, analysis and visualisation of data relating to the ownership and use of patents.
Initially, Cipher was focused on analysing and comparing patent owning companies. In 2017 we invented Cipher Classifiers, a new and improved way to map patents to technologies using supervised machine learning.
This breakthrough made it possible to establish objective and repeatable ways to communicate both the risk and value associated with patents to IP leaders, the board and the investor community more broadly.
Cipher is recognised as the leading provider of strategic patent intelligence to major patent owning organisations.
On 31 March 2023, Cipher became part of LexisNexis Intellectual Property.
Where it started
Why Cipher
Trained by humans, built by machine to give you independently verified accuracy
“Cipher’s classifiers enable you to understand the patent landscape or analyze a portfolio. Combining expertise in both IP and data science, Cipher provides you with solutions to the strategic problems patent owners face, with quick and accurate results.” Erik Oliver, Richardson Oliver Insights
Leadership Team
Nigel Swycher – CEO
Nigel is CEO and co-founder of Cipher. Nigel’s background is as an IP lawyer, having been a partner at Slaughter and May, London for 20 years. Throughout his career Nigel has focused on the creation, defence and exploitation of IP assets, and helping companies, their advisers and investors understand the importance of intangible assets. Nigel is a director of ORoPO (the Open Register of Patent Ownership) and is a recognised as an expert by the IAM Strategy 300.
Steve Harris – CTO
Steve is the co-founder and responsible for the design and implementation of Cipher. Previously he was CTO of a UK-based FinTech startup, Garlik, until its sale to Experian in 2011. Steve was a researcher at the University of Southampton, specialising in Artificial Intelligence, Information Extraction, and Graph Databases. Steve advises the UK Government and European Commission. In 2020 Steve was recognised as an expert by the IAM Strategy 300.
Stewart Hogg – CRO
Stewart leads the Commercial arm of Cipher, managing the Sales, Customer success and Marketing teams, responsible for delivering revenue. He has run commercial teams, previously as Head of Sales and Marketing at Maplecroft for 4 years. Prior to that he was at Wood Mackenzie for 12 years, where he held sales leadership positions in Europe and US, launching the sales effort in New York around Institutional Investors. He started his career at Jobsite.
Francesca Levoir
Head of Marketing
Francesca is responsible for building awareness of the Cipher brand and lead generation. She worked at Wood Mackenzie for 16 years in Marketing, building teams in Asia and Europe; focusing on building brands in new markets, product launches, acquisitions and developing new business leads for sales. Her Marketing career started at Procter & Gamble.
Cipher as part of the Community
Transparency
Cipher is a founding member of the Open Register of Patent Ownership (ORoPO), which is committed to improving the data quality around patent ownership.
PAE risk
Cipher is a member of LOT Network as we believe that patents should encourage innovation and not litigation. Read our report on the LOT Network portfolio.
With Cipher you can…
Optimise your portfolio
Ensure you have the right portfolio to meet your strategic patenting objectives.
Gather competitor intelligence
Understand who’s doing what by automating patent to technology mapping.
Model cross licensing
Combine patent and revenue data to determine rational licensing outcomes.
Manage your budget
Justify patent budgets and communicate the impact of your investment.
Conduct due diligence
Automate manual reviews for efficient execution of M&A and licensing transactions.
Tackle inbound patent assertion
Be prepared with evidence to create a fast and effective threat assessment.
Benchmark your portfolio
Assess your portfolio in comparison to other owners through your technology lens.
Monetise your portfolio
Identify opportunities to create value through licensing or sale of patent assets.
Predict technology trends
Track new technologies and discover the unknown owners of future innovation.
Create Risk Mitigation Strategies
Understand the materiality of your threats to define your risk mitigation strategy.