Title	NAMECHECK™ BY TRADEMARKNOW
Product/Service	WEB PLATFORM
Category	A01. Innovative Technology (incl. standalone solutions not in association with a brand or creative campaign)
Entrant Company	TRADEMARKNOW Helsinki, FINLAND
Advertising Agency	TRADEMARKNOW Helsinki, FINLAND

Name	Company	Position
Mikael Kolehmainen	TrademarkNow	Co-founder and CEO
Matti Kokkola	TrademarkNow	Co-founder and CTO
Anna Ronkainen	TrademarkNow	Co-founder and Chief Scientist
Heikki Vesalainen	TrademarkNow	Co-founder and Chief Architect

The Brief

As with most companies who introduce an innovative new way of doing something, our company was founded by someone who actually experienced the pain first hand. Our Co-founder and CEO, was an international trademark attorney who felt the pain of searching and clearing trademarks using the old manual methods and legacy systems before founding the company. He got to a point where he said, “There has to be a better way!” When he realized there wasn’t, he saw a great opportunity. At the same time, our Co-founder and Chief Scientist, a computer science and law student at the University of Helsinki, had been doing her research on computational modeling of legal reasoning (artificial intelligence to make computers think and reason like a human lawyer) for 10 years. When the two met, his business strategy and her academic work were a match made in heaven. They quickly brought in two technology gurus to develop the platform and in 2012, the company was born. Capital quickly followed in the form of pre-seed funding and government grants and the founders were able to build the the name checking product and secure their first client that same year. Challenges faced during development were getting access to country and community trademark databases, incorporating over 150 difference language dictionaries, and accessing sources of unregistered trademark data; however, the team was able to overcome these challenges. Our name searching product was publically launches and made generally available in 2013, and a client base of European companies, law firms and branding agencies quickly grew in the months that followed.

Our innovative technology addresses a pervasive pain in the market related to trademark and brand name clearing. Up until now, marketing and branding teams have had to spend up to a week or more to finding out if the names they are interested in are safe to pursue. Traditionally, marketing and branding professionals have had to engage in significant manual effort to try and determine if a name candidate is clear for use. Manual online searches, trademark registry database searches and searching dictionaries for word meaning in multiple languages must be conducted. This process may be repeated with over a hundred name ideas just for one naming project. Our name searching software is a completely new technology that the world has never had before, which replaces the manual human effort with a unique artificial intelligence based on 12+ years of research in domain models of trademark law, linguistics and machine learning. In a matter of 15 seconds, our software platform performs a global search of trademark registries, word meaning in over 200 languages and a “common law” search for unregistered marks in eCommerce stores, app stores, iTunes and a database of over 30 million company names to formulate a risk score for the name. This is provided to clients via a simple, easy-to-use online interface that presents results in a visually clean and prioritized manner. This dramatically diminishes the time and money spent on naming projects and equips teams to make better, faster decisions. The technology stack is controlled by the company. The next stage of development includes adding more global trademark data, further developing the algorithms and enhancing usability based on client and market feedback. In May of 2014, the company received $3.5M in Series A funding to invest in the product, the team, and the company’s global presence.

What started out as one man’s desire to improve a common process and one woman’s interest in the advancement of artificial intelligence has revolutionized the way new brand names are researched and cleared for use. According to research, at least $1.5 billion is wasted every year by companies using outmoded name searching processes. In addition, the market opportunity is estimated to be worth more than $3 billion. At the time of funding, over 5,000 unique trademarks had been cleared by our clients, who saved up to 10,000 working hours collectively and more than $3 million in unnecessary operational costs by using the platform. Today, we have over 50 clients including brand owners, law firms and branding agencies, alike, including F. Hoffmann-La Roche, Carlesberg Group, Kohl’s, Clark Modet & Co., Lexia, Off The Mark, DesignBridge, brandsymbol and Landor. Our technology not only makes the naming, branding and trademarking process more efficient, it is also making it more effective. Branding teams have shared that using our platform in brainstorming sessions not only allows them to eliminate names from the running, but that our search results also open name paths for creative exploration they had not previously considered.