You can't protect everything on a seed budget. Most founders protect the wrong thing first — or nothing at all.

PAIN

“IP strategy” sounds like a Series A problem, so early founders default to doing nothing, or to filing a trademark for the logo and calling it done. Meanwhile the things that actually carry the company's value — the source code, the trained model weights, the dataset, the brand name in the markets you'll actually sell into — sit unprotected. Or, worse, they remain owned by the wrong person: a contractor who never signed an assignment, a co-founder who built the MVP before the company existed, a university lab that still has a claim on the algorithm. Investors' lawyers find this in diligence, not before the term sheet — and clean-up under time pressure always costs more and gives away more leverage than doing it right the first time.

OUR APPROACH

We run new clients through a short IP triage in the first weeks:

• what exists (code, trademarks, domains, datasets, know-how),

• who legally owns each piece today, and

• what's exposed.

From there we prioritise by what would actually kill a deal — chain of title on core technology and trademark protection in your target markets almost always come before patents. Our Startup IP Suite (bytes-and-rights.com/services/startup-ip-suite) packages this triage and the resulting protection stack into a fixed-scope engagement built for exactly this stage, rather than a bespoke project priced for a company three rounds ahead.

TAKE

IP strategy isn't a filing checklist — it's knowing what you'd lose the deal over, and fixing that first. CHeck out our Lean IP Strategy for a Startup Guide to learn more!