IP Street Inc., a young Spokane-based venture that provides inventors, attorneys, and business executives the ability to analyze complex patent data, is starting to see some heavy traffic—or at least, traffic from some heavy hitters in the business world, its top executives say.

The concern was founded about 1 1/2 years ago by Lewis Lee, who's also a co-founder and partner of the big Spokane-based intellectual property law firm Lee & Hayes PLLC; Art Coffey, former President and CEO of Red Lion Hotels Corp.; and Rick White, a Seattle-based past CEO of tech-lobbying group TechNet and former member of the U.S. House of Representatives.

Just under three months ago, the company launched IP Street's online product publically. Since then, company CEO Lee says, its services have gained traction among users whose livelihoods are centered in the area of intellectual property.

Lee and Coffey decline to disclose the number of users the company has inked so far, but some of its early adopters include T-Mobile, Spokane-based Pathology Associates Medical Laboratory (PAML), Amazon.com, and Lee & Hayes. Other recent users of IP Street's product include Washington State University's research office, and Tsinghua University, a technology-focused university in China, Lee says.

"The work that we did targets about 2.5 million people in the U.S. who would have a use for the product and who get a substantial part of their livelihood from IP (intellectual property)," Coffey says.

IP Street's headquarters here are located on the 13th floor of the Bank of America Financial Center in downtown Spokane, at 601 W. Riverside.

The company employs five people here, including Lee and Coffey. It also employs a handful of software programmers who are spread out across the U.S. Coffey adds that the company's total employee count recently has declined because it doesn't need as many computer programmers now that the product site is live. At its peak of development, IP Street employed more than 20 programmers, he says.

Lee says, however, "Our goal is to grow here in Spokane more and more."

IP Street's independent board of directors is made up of Stacey Cowles, publisher of the Spokesman-Review and president of the Cowles Co., which owns the Journal of Business; Dennis Hopton, managing director of the Hong Kong office of Portland, Ore.-based Global Trade Advisors; and George Nethercutt, former Spokane attorney and 10-year veteran Congressman.

Coffey, who serves as IP Street's chief operating officer and chief financial officer, says the intent of the subscription-based service is to provide business executives, inventors, and intellectual-property professionals the tools to search, analyze, and make sense of what can be densely-worded patent documents that are often hundreds of pages in length.

"It's quick, actionable information that is readily available," Coffey says. "You could put in a sentence or a whole document that describes a concept of an invention and it will return—ranked by relevance—the most relevant patents or applications involved in that area and on a timeline. So you can then focus on companies with similar interests to license a technology to them, or to get a license (to use their patent) from them."

IP Street's software has been programmed to sort and aggregate more than 7 million cloud-based patent records that have been filed with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office since 1976, Coffey says.

Because the software is run on a cloud-based server, IP Street's services are accessible anywhere there's an Internet connection. The data that's accessible through IP Street's software also is updated weekly to ensure its users have access to the most current patent applications and granted patents, Coffey adds.

Users of IP Street have the option to sign up for a variety of subscription lengths, ranging from 24 hours of unlimited access to the site for $99, to three months of use for $1,499. Access for a week also can be purchased for $299 and 30 days of site use is priced at $699. Other subscription options also are available to allow access by multiple users within a company, as well as year-long subscriptions, which start at $6,000.

Coffey asserts that those subscription fees for IP Street's services are comparably less than what someone who's interested in analyzing specific patent information would pay an attorney who specializes in intellectual property for similar services.

"You can't even talk to an IP expert for under several hundred dollars," he contends. "It also depends on if you need opinion-based information. Many users ... just want to understand the (patent) landscape.

"But if you are able to look into it first yourself before you talk to an attorney, you are much farther down the road," Coffey adds.

The two co-founders decline to disclose IP Street's revenue projections or subscription sales in the last few months. They say they're optimistic that a varied mix of users would benefit from the company's offerings.

Lee says a shift in business asset classes from tangible assets to intangible assets throughout the last several decades is an indicator of the potential significance a service like what's offered by IP Street could play in the marketplace.

"In the 1970s most of the market capitalization in the S&P 500 was attributed to tangible assets—land, plants, equipment," Lee says. "Today, if you take the S&P 500 and look at the market caps, 80 to 90 percent is tied to intangible assets. The emerging asset class is intellectual property, and it's on company's books; it's what's tied up in their products and services."

Since IP Street launched its website in late August, Lee says that it's had a broad range of users, including intellectual property professionals, inventors, scientists, engineers, and businesspeople.

"Licensing execs are using it, trying to find people who might want to license products inbound or outbound, and scientists are using it trying to figure out technology landscapes and new technology areas," he says. "There are corporate businesspeople trying to benchmark companies and how they are performing relative to their competitors from an IP perspective."

Search results can be narrowed down to specific patent classifications or subclasses as defined by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

The idea for IP Street originally was born from a project that Lee & Hayes was involved in with a big Wall Street bank about five years ago, Lee says.

"We were doing some work with bankers in and around issues related to IP and how it impacts stock prices of companies they were invested in," he says. "We started to realize how important of an asset class IP was going to become, and yet it is such a technical and legal area that is hard for people to understand and wrap their minds around."

He adds, "The question was, 'How do we bring IP-based information and make it actionable for the business world and people who advise them?'"

Around the same time Lee's idea for a service like IP Street first was being evaluated, Coffey says he was involved in some advisory work for Lee & Hayes and that he joined Lee in the venture to provide the financial know-how for the company.

While the original idea for IP Street was developed based on work Lee was doing for the law firm, he says the two businesses are separate entities.