wert Intelligence Raises $10.9M Series B to Push Into Japan and Scale Its Patent AI Platform

wert Intelligence has raised $10.88 million (KRW 16.5 billion) in a Series B round led by Altos Ventures, with Albatross Investment joining as a follow-on investor. The round is a rare instance of major capital flowing into Korea’s patent and IP data market, a space long dominated by global players such as Clarivate, Anaqua, and Questel.

wert Intelligence was founded in 2015 by Jeong-ho Yoon, a Korean patent attorney and licensed U.S. attorney. The company launched its AI-powered patent search service, Keywert, the following year, and nearly a decade of focusing solely on patent data has produced PlutoLM, which the company describes as Korea’s first large language model trained exclusively on patent data. Eight products now sit on top of PlutoLM, including Keywert, Keywert Insight, and AI agents for drafting patent specifications and other customized IP work. The platform currently serves around 3,000 customers, including IP centers and R&D divisions at major Korean conglomerates as well as public institutions.

The global IP solutions market has long been led by international players such as Clarivate, Anaqua, and Questel. wert Intelligence is betting that Korean-language AI and workflows built around how Korean companies actually operate can give it an edge as it takes on that competitive global market.

With the new funding, wert Intelligence plans to further build out its patent AI capabilities and move into the Japanese market in the second half of this year. A decade spent going deep on a single category of patent data is now becoming a springboard abroad.

“Because patent search and analysis depend on finding and connecting precisely the right data, the more general-purpose AI advances, the more valuable the underlying data infrastructure becomes,” an Altos Ventures representative said. “We were also encouraged that IP centers at major Korean conglomerates and large law firms have already started switching from their existing solutions to wert, and that factored into our decision to invest.”

“This round gives wert Intelligence the resources for its next chapter,” said Jeong-ho Yoon, CEO of wert Intelligence. “As we take the most deeply built domain AI in Korea out into the global market, we intend to be the company that gets there first.”