After nearly a decade of developing cutting-edge software to make electricity providers, data centres and EV batteries more efficient, BluWave-ai is going a little off the grid in its latest effort to find more revenues. Earlier this month, the Kanata-based firm launched a new business unit to license its growing patent portfolio to other organizations […]
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After nearly a decade of developing cutting-edge software to make electricity providers, data centres and EV batteries more efficient, BluWave-ai is going a little off the grid in its latest effort to find more revenues.
Earlier this month, the Kanata-based firm launched a new business unit to license its growing patent portfolio to other organizations such as utility companies, allowing them to piggyback off its intellectual property to develop their own bespoke products.
BluWave hopes the IP licensing push will supplement the income it generates from its software, which uses artificial intelligence to track power usage, predict demand for electricity and help owners of electrical vehicle fleets manage the operation and charging of EVs in a bid to save energy.
“The goal is to get a larger piece (of the potential market) than what we can get from our organic sales,” explains BluWave founder and chief executive Devashish Paul.
Founded in 2017, BluWave has spent nearly $25 million developing its platform and has filed more than 60 patents – 14 of which have been granted or recently approved in the U.S. and other jurisdictions.
Along the way, the company has become a trailblazer in its field. According to Ottawa-based consulting firm Stratford Managers, which recently did a global analysis of all the patent portfolios in BluWave’s market segment, its filings are surpassed only by global automotive giants such as Volvo and Honda.
Paul – who has long touted his belief that his company can become a “made-in-Canada champion” in one of the hottest corners of the cleantech sandbox – and other BluWave executives think that expertise may be a key driver of new revenue.
“This is kind of like a deal sweetener for most of our already existing clients,” says Muhammad Zaheed, the firm’s vice-president of finance.
BluWave plans to offer its IP in a number of packages. Customers can gain access to all of the firm’s patents when they buy particular software products, or they can buy a licence to use specific applications in three main categories of patents: smart grid, renewables and energy storage, and electrified transport.
“It’s as if you built our IP yourself,” Paul explains.
Users will be charged an upfront fee and then make annual payments based on factors such as how much of the IP they use. BluWave, meanwhile, retains ownership of the patents.
While BluWave is opening its patent portfolio to everyone, the company is also prepared to reserve some of its IP for specific users that are willing to shell out extra.
As Paul explains, such a licence with “enforcement rights” would give the buyer exclusive access to specific BluWave technology, along with the right to take legal action against any competitors that try to poach or copy the IP.
That type of deal would be a win for BluWave, says Paul, who knows full well his company doesn’t have the financial warchest to wage protracted patent infringement battles on its own.
“We kind of want to be a Switzerland of IP for energy transition,” he says. “We don’t want to fight with the big players on who infringed on what. They just do that as a course of business. We don’t want to get caught in the middle of that. We want to stick to innovation. We want to stick to solving the use case.”
Paul is hopeful the strategy will pay off. He says the firm’s “foundational” patent pool could be an attractive value proposition for an array of large energy utility companies, green-energy equipment manufacturers and governments, because rather than being focused on specific software codes and algorithms, it contains systems and methods that can be applied to a wide range of applications.
“We’ve tried to formulate them like patenting new techniques of jogging versus patenting a running shoe,” he explains. “Regardless of what shoe you use, we’ve patented a new style of running. If you want to do that style of running, it doesn’t really matter what shoe you use.”
