Daniel Ruskin began his career as a Coinbase engineer at age 14. As he says, he was a teenager who “knowed how to code and wanted to make something cool.”
Clearly too young to get a bank account, Ruskin did some freelance development work he found on Reddit in exchange for Bitcoin. So he saw Coinbase being employed and boldly sent a cold email to the person in charge of the operation asking if he could work for Crypto Exchange.
“Simply put, I ended up writing a lot of the early software powered by the Coinbase platform,” he tells TechCrunch. “I didn’t write a V0 codebase, but I wrote a lot of the software that brought us from 1 to 10.”
Four years later at Coinbase, Ruskin decided to go to university and then to law school. He started a few startups along the way. Along the way, he drafted a patent for the technology and included the election security company he had acquired.
In December 2024, Ruskin was unhappy with how the patent process was “opaque.”
Ruskin, now 26, says Inventex wants to ease the process of preparing and filing a patent application using a set of AI agents, augmented by licensed lawyers. He believes Inventex can help businesses become “10 times faster” in days, rather than months that traditional companies might take.
The concept immediately attracted investors, and just a month later, Ruskin grew Inventex by raising $2.4 million in the pre-seed round. Convicted Capital, Coinbase co-founder Fred Alethum, and Cambrian Ventures, are co-led to lead funding, including participation from Boost and others. The money was raised through a safe at a $10 million valuation.
InventEx accepts the necessary technical data provided by the customer, including code, design documents, and technical specifications. Next, identify what customers have invented that meet the legal requirements of patentability. This includes searching for previous art, what has been done previously in that particular customer’s technical field, and “customer differences,” Ruskin said.
We draft and file patent applications on behalf of our US and overseas companies.
Maksim Stepanenko, who worked with Ruskin at Coinbase, told TechCrunch that after Ruskin began a still-high school student with “Soon” at Crypto Company, he “soon” had launched a major payment infrastructure project impressively “soon.” So when he asked what Ruskin was doing with Inventex, he signed on as a small angel investor as part of his pre-seed funds.
“He’s thoughtful, fast moving and very good at navigating complex systems,” said Stepanenko, the founder of a startup called Operator. “I’ve been following his work ever since. [working with him at Coinbase] And I was excited to support his new company. [He’s] One of the quietest and most impressive people I have worked with. ”
“More inbound than we can handle.”
In addition to speed, Ruskin claims that Inventex’s approach will also obtain high-quality patents for its customers.
“We specifically tweak the models for each technical field, and our agents are true experts in each technical field where our customers work,” he said. Ruskin believes that traditional patent lawyers often do not understand the outline of the invention they protect. The technical agents are supervised and refined by licensed lawyers.
Ruskin believes Inventex has an innovative and appropriate model with this complex subset of legal services.
“Our competitors sell software as task-based automation to traditional law firms, and deployment is constrained by incentives such as billable business hours models and broader schemes of expertise and outcome payment,” he said. “We will postpone this by providing end-to-end services.”
Ruskin also generalizes the Inventex model. For example, Inventex said it is currently using one of its tools to automate complaints from the MSPB (US Merit System Protection Board) of tens of thousands of federal employees who were recently fired.
“Traditional companies cannot support such workloads,” he said.
According to Ruskin, which includes two public companies and numerous startups, Inventex has annual recurring revenues of around $250,000 in the pipeline. Dirac has given you permission to give it a name.
“We have more inbounds than we can handle,” Ruskin said.
Building a Unicorn
Ruskin also has expertise in the field of fintech. He joined CheCkR, a service that gig platform pays employees in 2022. So Ruskin helped launch CheCKR Pay, called “Startups within Startups.” While there, Ruskin hired a team of three engineers and “in about three to four months we built and launched a neobank.” (CHECKR raised $250 million in 2021 at a valuation of $4.6 billion.) Ruskin left the company in 2023, graduated from law school at New York University, and graduated from the top 10% of his class in 2024.
During CheCkr Pay, Ruskin learned about Cambrian Ventures’ solo GP Rex Salisbury, describing the young entrepreneur as the “best speed engineer” of the company.
“If you ask the early Coinbase teams, they’ll tell you the same thing. It’s pretty remarkable given that he was still in high school,” Salisbury told TechCrunch. “Daniel helped build two unicorns (Coinbase and CheCkR) before graduating from university, then graduated from law school and passed the patent bar. [He’s a] A rather rare combination of talent. ”
He added: “In this early stage, it’s not purely evaluating the company purely for what it is, it’s about what it is. What Daniel has built is already amazing, but what gives him speed and really excites me is how quickly he runs to get faster.”
Make patents more accessible
Inventex has grown twice as many months since December, mainly through word-of-mouth referrals and partnerships with VCS. The company charges customers monthly fees to build a patent portfolio. Fees include discovery, drafting, filing of inventions, and patent prosecution.
Currently, we have three full-time employees (all engineers) and several contract patent attorneys.
According to Ruskin, Inventex’s closest competitors are patent launch tools such as Edge and Solve.
Before Inventex, Ruskin founded Motif in July 2024, which had the same concept, but had a co-founder “didn’t work.”
Ruskin is considering offering Inventex’s draft toolkit as a white sign product for law firms so that it can license the tool “to make clients better patents faster.”
“This is consistent with our long-term vision for the field of patent law. Currently, 90% of the requestable time for an initial patent application is spent drafting disclosures, and 10% is spent on strategy,” he said. “This will turn over in five years. The draft takes 10% time and the strategy becomes a differentiated service offered by the company. This ultimately brings costs to file a patent, making the system more accessible to innovators of all sizes.”
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