Enginuity raises £500,000 pre-seed to commercialise dormant patents using multi-agent AI
This article covers Enginuity, a legaltech startup, which has raised £500k in a pre-seed funding round led by Fuel Ventures to develop a multi-agent AI platform that maps global intellectual property against live market demand. The funding aims to support product development, hiring and expansion of partnerships across the UK, US and Europe, targeting innovators, R&D teams, universities and corporate innovation groups seeking to commercialise dormant patents.
Enginuity has raised £500,000 in a pre-seed funding round led by Fuel Ventures to develop a multi-agent AI platform that maps global intellectual property against live market demand. The investment, which also includes Symvan Capital and angel investors, will fund product development, hiring across engineering and business development, and expansion of partnerships across the UK, US and Europe — a push aimed at making dormant patents easier to find and commercialise.
Why it matters
Organisations spend roughly $2.5 trillion a year on research and development, yet an estimated 95 per cent of patents go unused, representing about $1.58 trillion in unrealised innovation value. That gap leaves a large addressable problem for corporates, universities and venture builders trying to turn existing inventions into commercial products. Enginuity’s approach targets that inefficiency by surfacing applicable technologies and matching them to current market signals, potentially shortening the time from discovery to deployment.
Inside the product
Enginuity uses what it describes as multi-agent AI to index and map patents and other IP against demand indicators from industry. The platform is aimed at innovators, R&D teams, universities and corporate innovation groups that want to find existing solutions rather than start development from scratch.
The company says the platform lets users discover relevant inventions faster and opens commercial pathways for dormant assets. Enginuity is already piloting with a mix of academia and industry partners and positions itself as a connector between research outputs and commercial use cases.
Enginuity works with several innovation networks and institutions as part of its development and pilot programmes. These include Cambridge and the Technical University of Munich, both major research universities; MIT/Harvard, representing US research ecosystems; Oxbridge AI, a community linking Oxford and Cambridge AI activity; and Xpreneurs, an accelerator that Enginuity lists as an alumnus. It is also running pilots with corporates and venture studios such as C10 Labs, a venture studio that helps companies test and build new products.
Who are the investors?
The round was led by Fuel Ventures, with participation from Symvan Capital and unnamed angel investors. The total raise is £500,000 and will be used to accelerate development, grow engineering and business-development teams, and expand commercial partnerships across the UK, US and Europe.
In the announcement, Mark Pearson, Founder at Fuel Ventures, said:
Enginuity is tackling one of the biggest inefficiencies in global innovation, the waste of untapped IP. Richard and the team have built a platform with the potential to transform how ideas are discovered and applied across industries. We’re proud to back founders who combine deep industry understanding with the ambition to redefine how innovation scales, and Enginuity exemplifies that.
If you're researching potential backers in this space:
- Explore our list of legaltech venture capital firms in the UK
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Founder perspective
In the announcement, Richard Heggie, Founder & CEO at Enginuity, said:
Every major industry faces pressure to innovate faster, yet the majority of the world’s ideas sit unused on the shelf. Enginuity exists to change that. By making IP searchable and commercially relevant, we’re helping innovators save time, unlock value and build on what already exists. This funding enables us to accelerate our go-to-market strategy, expand our partnerships and help more organisations turn dormant IP into active opportunity.
Heggie frames the product as a practical tool for teams that want to reduce duplicated effort and unlock revenue from existing work rather than rely solely on fresh invention.
The bigger picture
The funding sits at the intersection of legaltech and innovation-management trends: tools that surface and score intellectual property are increasingly relevant as organisations look to squeeze more value from prior R&D investment. For universities and corporate labs under pressure to demonstrate impact, searchable IP and clear routes to commercialisation can shorten time-to-market and support licensing or spin-out strategies.
The deal also reflects growing interest from legaltech investors in solutions that make IP more discoverable and actionable. If Enginuity can convert pilot programmes into repeatable revenue streams, it will join a small but growing group of startups helping bridge academic and corporate innovation pipelines.
This round underscores how UK-founded companies are positioning themselves within broader European and US research ecosystems, leveraging local university partnerships while aiming for international commercial markets.
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