Deep Tech Finder: Creating more funding opportunities for universities and startups

The European Patent Office (EPO) has recently upgraded one of its patent search tools, Deep Tech Finder. Deep Tech Finder is a digital platform established by the European Patent Office to promote communication between universities and start-ups and commercial investment by comprehensively displaying European patent applications of universities and start-ups.

Data from the EPO show that the contribution of academic researchers to European patent applications has grown steadily over the past few decades and now exceeds 10% of all patents filed by European applicants at the EPO. However, the transfer of patented technology to the market remains a challenge for universities from a market perspective.

Deep Tech Finder was created by the EPO for such a purpose, and is free for users to access, so that companies, researchers and potential investors can gain a deeper understanding of the innovation of universities, university spin-offs and start-ups in the field of science and technology. In order to provide reliable results, when establishing Deep Tech Finder, the global platform Dealroom provided all data on start-ups, and the European Higher Education Sector Observatory provided data on universities, which were compared with EPO patent data to make the displayed search results more accurate.

Currently, Deep Tech Finder covers nearly 900 universities and more than 1,500 spin-off companies in Europe. Users can set and select countries, technology fields and patent application status on Deep tech finder (epo.org) , accurately find a startup company in the technology field in the target country, and see all patents and patent applications under the company in the list. At the same time, Deep Tech Finder can also provide downloads to export search results into CSV files for further use by users. As a very useful tool, Deep Tech Finder provides investors with a very portable opportunity to discover startups, and can also play a role in monitoring the research status of the most advanced technologies and scientific fields.