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Visualizing Companies with the Most Patents Granted in 2021

by Raul Amoros
This post is by Raul Amoros from Visual Capitalist

companies with the most patents

The Briefing

  • In 2021, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) granted a total of 327,798 utility patents
  • For almost three decades, IBM has been granted more patents each year than any other U.S. company

Visualizing Companies with the Most Patents Granted in 2021

Companies around the world invest billions in R&D to provide cutting-edge innovation to their products and services. In order to protect these investments, companies apply for patents. Therefore, the number of utility patents a company is granted can be considered a rough measure of its level of innovation.

Every year, the Patent 300 List identifies America’s most innovative companies within the intellectual property space by analyzing the patents granted by the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO).

In 2021, the USPTO granted a total of 327,798 utility patents, down 7% from the previous year. Let’s take a look at which companies generated the most patents in 2021.

RankCountryCompany/Organization2021
Patents		Change
from 2020
1?? U.S.International Business Machines Corporation8,540-9%
2?? South KoreaSamsung Electronics Co., Ltd.8,5170%
3?? South KoreaLg Corporation4,388-13%
4?? JapanCanon K.K.3,400-8%
5?? ChinaHuawei Technologies Co., Ltd.2,955-7%
6?? U.S.Intel Corporation2,835-14%
7?? TaiwanTaiwan Semiconductor Mfg. Co. Ltd.2,807-3%
8?? JapanToyota Jidosha K.K.2,753-2%
9?? U.S.Raytheon Technologies Corporation2,694-16%
10?? JapanSony Corporation2,624-9%

For 29 consecutive years, IBM has led U.S. companies in the number of patents received annually. (Read more...)

Top 50 Companies Proportion of World GDP

by Omri Wallach
This post is by Omri Wallach from Visual Capitalist

DS--Top-50-Companies-as-Proportion-of-Global-GDP

The Briefing

  • The combined market cap of the world’s top 50 companies was proportional to 27.6% of global GDP in 2020, up from just 4.7% of global GDP in 1990
  • Tech’s role continues to grow, now accounting for 21 of the top 50 companies

Top 50 Companies Proportion of World GDP

The world’s top 50 companies have become increasingly more valuable, and more powerful, over time.

As global GDP has grown over the last four decades, from $23.6 trillion in 1990 to $84.5 trillion in 2020, the proportional share of the world’s top companies by market capitalization has grown over five-fold.

YearGlobal GDPTop 50 Companies Market Cap as a % of GDP
1990$23.6T4.7%
2000$34.0T22.1%
2010$66.2T12.7%
2020$84.5T27.6%

Though the world’s top 50 companies change year-to-year, there’s also a lot of overlap.

Which Companies Dominated Each Decade?

2020’s largest company by market cap, Apple at $2.26 trillion, was the third largest company in 2010. Likewise, 2010’s largest company was Exxon Mobil, which was the second largest company in both 1990 and 2000 (but has since fallen off).

The top 50 companies in the world also highlight the increasing role of tech in the modern market. 1990’s largest company IBM was just one of three tech companies that made the ranking that year. Even in 2000, when the world’s largest company was GE, tech companies like Cisco and Microsoft only made up three of the top 10 companies by market (Read more...)

Vercel raises $102M Series C for its front-end development platform

by Frederic Lardinois

Vercel, the company behind the popular open-source Next.js React framework, today announced that it has raised a $102 million Series C funding round led by Bedrock Capital. Existing investors Accel, CRV,
Geodesic Capital, Greenoaks Capital and GV also participated in this round, together with new investors 8VC, Flex Capital, GGV, Latacora, Salesforce Ventures and Tiger Global. In total, the company has now raised $163 million and its current valuation is $1.1 billion.

As Vercel notes, the company saw strong growth in recent months, with traffic to all sites and apps on its network doubling since October 2020. About half of the world’s largest 10,000 websites now use Next.js . Given the open-source nature of the Next.js framework, not all of these users are obviously Vercel customers, but its current paying customers include the likes of Carhartt, Github, IBM, McDonald’s and Uber.

Image Credits: Vercel

“For us, it all starts with a front-end developer,” Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch told me. “Our goal is to create and empower those developers — and their teams — to create delightful, immersive web experiences for their customers.”

With Vercel, Rauch and his team took the Next.js framework and then built a serverless platform that specifically caters to this framework and allows developers to focus on building their front ends without having to worry about scaling and performance.

Older solutions, Rauch argues, were built in isolation from the cloud platforms and serverless technologies, leaving it up to the developers to deploy and scale their solutions. (Read more...)

What does Red Hat’s sale to IBM tell us about Couchbase’s valuation?

by Alex Wilhelm

The IPO rush of 2021 continued this week with a fresh filing from NoSQL provider Couchbase. The company raised hundreds of millions while private, making its impending debut an important moment for a number of private investors, including venture capitalists.

According to PitchBook data, Couchbase was last valued at a post-money valuation of $580 million when it raised $105 million in May 2020. The company — despite its expansive fundraising history — is not a unicorn heading into its debut to the best of our knowledge.

We’d like to uncover whether it will be one when it prices and starts to trade, so we dug into Couchbase’s business model and its financial performance, hoping to better understand the company and its market comps.

The Couchbase S-1

The Couchbase S-1 filing details a company that sells database tech. More specifically, Couchbase offers customers database technology that includes what NoSQL can offer (“schema flexibility,” in the company’s phrasing), as well as the ability to ask questions of their data with SQL queries.

Couchbase’s software can be deployed on clouds, including public clouds, in hybrid environments, and even on-prem setups. The company sells to large companies, attracting 541 customers by the end of its fiscal 2021 that generated $107.8 million in annual recurring revenue, or ARR, by the close of last year.

Couchbase breaks its revenue into two main buckets. The first, subscription, includes software license income and what the company calls “support and other” revenues, which it defines as “post-contract (Read more...)

IBM is acquiring cloud app and network management firm Turbonomic for up to $2B

by Ingrid Lunden

IBM today made another acquisition to deepen its reach into providing enterprises with AI-based services to manage their networks and workloads. It announced that it is acquiring Turbonomic, a company that provides tools to manage application performance (specifically resource management), along with Kubernetes and network performance — part of its bigger strategy to bring more AI into IT ops, or as it calls it, AIOps.

Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed, but according to data in PitchBook, Turbonomic was valued at nearly $1 billion — $963 million, to be exact — in its last funding round in September 2019. A report in Reuters rumoring the deal a little earlier today valued it at between $1.5 billion and $2 billion. A source tells us the figure is accurate.

The Boston-based company’s investors included General Atlantic, Cisco, Bain, Highland Capital Partners, and Red Hat. The last of these, of course, is now a part of IBM (so it was theoretically also an investor), and together Red Hat and IBM have been developing a range of cloud-based tools addressing telco, edge and enterprise use cases.

This latest deal will help extend that further, and it has more generally been an area that IBM has been aggressive in recently. Last November IBM acquired another company called Instana to bring application performance management into its stable, and it pointed out today that the Turbonomic deal will complement that and the two technologies’ tools will be integrated together, IBM said.

Turbonomic’s (Read more...)

IBM acquires Italy’s MyInvenio to integrate process mining directly into its suite of automation tools

by Ingrid Lunden

Automation has become a big theme in enterprise IT, with organizations using RPA, no-code and low-code tools, and other  technology to speed up work and bring more insights and analytics into how they do things every day, and today IBM is announcing an acquisition as it hopes to take on a bigger role in providing those automation services. The IT giant has acquired MyInvenio, an Italian startup that builds and operates process mining software.

Process mining is the part of the automation stack that tracks data produced by a company’s software, as well as how the software works, in order to provide guidance on what a company could and should do to improve it. In the case of myInvenio, the company’s approach involves making a “digital twin” of an organization to help track and optimize processes. IBM is interested in how myInvenio’s tools are able to monitor data in areas like sales, procurement, production and accounting to help organizations identify what might be better served with more automation, which it can in turn run using RPA or other tools as needed.

Terms of the deal are not being disclosed. It is not clear if myInvenio had any outside investors (we’ve asked and are awaiting a response). This is the second acquisition IBM has made out of Italy. (The first was in 2014, a company called CrossIdeas that now forms part of the company’s security business.)

IBM and myInvenio are not exactly strangers: the two inked a deal as recently as (Read more...)