Intellectual property data now live: 18 new patent and trade mark tests
Senserity now reads two intellectual property sources: the European Patent Office's published patent data, and the UK, EU and international trade mark registers. Together they take us to 32 data sources, and they bring 18 new automated tests covering what a company has invented, what it has branded, and how widely it has protected either.
Every one of the 18 is available on the free tier.
These two sources answer a question that most due diligence never gets to. Accounts tell you whether a business is solvent. Enforcement records tell you whether it has been in trouble. Neither tells you whether a company that describes itself as an engineering innovator has actually invented anything, or whether a business trading on twenty years of brand heritage owns the name it is selling under. Registered IP is one of the few public records that corroborates a capability claim rather than a compliance obligation.
A deliberate decision: none of this affects a risk grade
Before anything else, the most important thing to say about these 18 tests is what they do not do.
All 18 are registered at informational severity. That means they carry a scoring multiplier of zero and are excluded from the Governance category score and from the overall A–E risk grade. A company that holds no patents and no trade marks scores exactly the same as one holding hundreds.
This is deliberate, and it is worth explaining because the opposite would have been easy and wrong. The overwhelming majority of legitimate UK companies hold no registered intellectual property at all. A haulier will never file a patent. A cleaning contractor has no reason to register a trade mark. A recruitment agency trading successfully for thirty years may own neither. Treating that absence as a risk signal would penalise most of the UK economy for behaving entirely normally, and would quietly bias every score against smaller and service-sector suppliers.
So the tests report what is there. They never report an absence as a finding. Where a company holds nothing, the profile says so plainly and moves on.
What the patent tests check
Ten tests (GOV-088 to GOV-097) cover registered patents, sourced from the European Patent Office's Open Patent Services. Coverage spans UK national applications, European applications, and international applications under the Patent Cooperation Treaty.
The headline figure is a count of inventions, not documents. Protecting one invention in six countries produces six published patent documents describing the same idea. Counting those as six patents would overstate a portfolio by a factor of six, so Senserity groups them into a single family and counts once. A company that has protected four inventions worldwide is shown as holding four.
Alongside the count, the tests report how many inventions have been granted rather than merely filed — an application is published around eighteen months after filing but is not enforceable until a patent office has examined and approved it, and it can still be refused or withdrawn. They report territorial reach, since protecting an invention in ten countries costs real money and is rarely pursued unless a business actually trades or licenses internationally. They report filing recency and span, which distinguishes a company still actively developing from one trading on a core invention protected decades ago — both legitimate, but different. And they profile the technology areas a company patents in, using the International Patent Classification, which is a straightforward way to check that claimed technical capabilities match what has actually been protected.
Finally, a portfolio detail table lists each invention with its publication number, status, territories and filing date, and links straight through to the record on Espacenet so anything shown can be verified independently.
What the trade mark tests check
Eight tests (GOV-098 to GOV-105) cover registered trade marks across the UK register, the EU register, and international registrations under the Madrid system, the treaty that lets one application designate many countries.
The same counting principle applies: one brand registered in three places is one mark, not three. On top of the count, the tests split marks into those currently in force and those that have lapsed or expired. Trade marks must be renewed every ten years, so a tail of lapsed registrations is usually just a brand history — retired product names, rebranded lines — rather than a problem, and the split is shown so the current portfolio can be read alongside what came before.
Brand protection breadth reports whether the most widely protected mark covers one register, two, or all three. As with patents, breadth costs money and ongoing renewal fees, so a company protecting a brand across the UK, the EU and internationally is telling you something about where it trades.
The portfolio table lists each mark with its form — words only, a logo or device, or the two combined — its status, the registers it appears on, its filing date, and the classes it covers. Those classes follow the Nice classification, the international scheme that groups all goods and services into 45 numbered classes. They matter more than they first appear: protection extends only to the classes claimed, so the classes on a mark show what the brand actually covers rather than what a company might assume it covers.
The Brexit test that reveals brand age
One test is worth calling out on its own. GOV-105 identifies comparable rights.
When the Brexit transition period ended on 31 December 2020, EU trade marks stopped covering the UK. Rather than let holders lose protection overnight, the UK IPO automatically created an equivalent UK registration — a comparable right — for every EU mark in force on that date, carrying the original filing date across.
The practical consequence is that a comparable right is a marker of age. Its presence proves the brand was protected EU-wide before 2021, which is a useful corroboration when a supplier claims a long trading history. It is the kind of detail that is invisible unless you know to look for it, and it costs nothing to check.
How companies are matched, and why it is imperfect
Neither patent nor trade mark records carry company registration numbers. Filings name an applicant or owner, and that name is all there is to match on. This has two consequences we would rather state openly than paper over.
Results describe the named company only. Group intellectual property very commonly sits with an operating subsidiary or a dedicated IP holding company. A parent or holding company can legitimately show nothing while the group it heads owns a substantial portfolio. Senserity reports what is registered to the entity you are assessing, and does not roll up group holdings into it.
Similar names are excluded rather than assumed. A search for a common company name will surface filings belonging to unrelated businesses, frequently overseas ones sharing the same words. Every result is re-checked against the registered name before it is stored, and anything that fails is discarded rather than wrongly attributed. Where a search finds similarly named filings but confirms none of them, the profile says exactly that — a different statement from finding nothing at all.
There is one honest limitation on top. Where a company's name is a subset of a much larger brand owner's name, a search can return more records than it examines, and a small portfolio genuinely held by the smaller company can sit beyond them. In that specific case Senserity reports the result as unconfirmed rather than as a definite absence, because saying "we found nothing" would be a stronger claim than the evidence supports.
Where to find it
Both sources appear in the Intellectual Property panel at the foot of the Governance tab on any company profile, and in an Intellectual Property section in PDF reports. The People & Governance report carries dedicated Registered Patents and Registered Trade Marks sections.
If you already have companies on your watchlist, the tests will run on the next scheduled assessment — no action needed. If you are evaluating Senserity, the free tier includes all 18 alongside the full suite of Companies House, sanctions and public register checks. Add a manufacturer, an engineering firm or a consumer brand and the results will appear alongside everything else.