Cypris raises $4M to help R&D teams track global innovation

January 19, 2023
5min read

NEW YORK, NY, January 19th, 2023 - Cypris, a research platform for R&D teams, today announced a $4M Series A, led by York IE with notable institutional co-investors, Activate VP, K20 Fund & BlueTree Capital. The investment will enable Cypris to further its mission of helping R&D teams track and analyze global innovation through a single comprehensive platform.

Launched in 2021, the Cypris platform allows users to gain unique insights on technologies and companies from 500M+ live data points from sources like global patents, research papers, market news, and more. Cypris is empowering engineers much like Alphasense does for finance and PitchBook does for venture capital. 

Today, R&D teams rely on misaligned or archaic software and costly service providers to answer pressing questions that can hold a significant impact on their long term product roadmap. Engineering teams are also increasingly tasked with building business cases around the verticals they’re looking to invest in, without being armed with the proper data—a daunting and time consuming task. Cypris releases that time consuming hold, while enabling new innovation discovery, by centralizing multiple disparate datasets in one single location. 

“There are more platform innovations being introduced to markets today than at any point in history, across a wide spectrum of verticals,” said Steve Hafif, founder and CEO, Cypris. “Innovations in AI, blockchain, genomics, GPT, all have the power to drastically alter the evolution of even the most specialized markets. The responsibility of tracking these potentially disruptive technological breakthroughs, in many cases, are falling to R&D leaders. Without the proper tools they’re flying blind.”

Through the platform, users can run queries on virtually any keyword, competitor name or forward-looking concept and receive an automated and interactive report built on the historical and current status of innovation on the field or company. The data is pulled from a large proprietary database that the Cypris team curates and updates daily, which consists of major datasets like research papers, patents, product launch news, and more.

Searches that users perform can be saved into reports and grouped into projects that allow for sharing, collaboration among team members, and monitoring of key events within that space like lawsuits, new product launches, unusual market activity, IPOs, and more. Cypris also ensures competitive behavior and pivotal market movements don’t go unnoticed, to allow R&D teams to build their product roadmaps based on relevant and timely data. 

“We’ve found that Cypris is becoming a core part of an R&D team’s basic research process. Users are spending time at the earliest level of a project to build reports surrounding keywords and competitors within a landscape, then adding robust monitoring links to have updates come to them. This gives teams the chance to develop with confidence, and spend less time on dashboards and more time in the lab,” said Steve. 

Although Cypris currently markets to R&D as it’s core user profile, the platform has also proven to be beneficial for professionals in M&A, business development, finance, and venture capital, as an effective tool for conducting advanced technical inquiries.

"Over the past year, Cypris has generated strong product market fit with large enterprise customers across multiple verticals," said Joe Rackza, co-founder and managing partner, York IE. "This success shows that Cypris is becoming a mission critical tool for R&D and innovation teams. While we believe strongly in the market opportunity, we also know Steve is building the right team to capitalize on it. He has a great grasp on their market, business fundamentals, and how to grow the company." 

Cypris plans to use the new funding to invest deeper into their AI applications to decrease ‘time to insights’ for users and to create new opportunities for innovation discovery through the platform. 

For more information on Cypris, visit their website.

About Cypris:

Cypris is a market intelligence platform built for research and development and innovation teams. Designed to serve as a single ecosystem for global innovation data, the Cypris platform allows users to gain unique insights from 500M+ global data points to answer key questions about their market, competitors, core technologies, and more to support new product development, commercial strategy, and accelerate global innovation. To learn more about Cypris and how they help R&D and innovation teams, visit their website.

Press Contact:

McKenna Cosway

mckennac@cypris.ai

Similar insights you might enjoy

Why Patent Data Alone Is Not Enough: The Commercial Intelligence Gap in Enterprise IP Strategy

Enterprise IP teams using patent-only analytics platforms for R&D strategy are making trillion-dollar resource allocation decisions with a structurally incomplete intelligence picture. Patent landscaping tools reveal invention activity but systematically exclude the scientific literature signals that precede patents by months or years and the commercial intelligence, including startup activity, venture funding, regulatory data, and M&A trends, that determines whether a patented technology will ever reach a customer. Closing this gap requires integrated R&D intelligence platforms that treat patent data as one layer of a multi-source model rather than the entire model itself.

Why Patent Data Alone Is Not Enough: The Commercial Intelligence Gap in Enterprise IP Strategy

Enterprise IP teams using patent-only analytics platforms for R&D strategy are making trillion-dollar resource allocation decisions with a structurally incomplete intelligence picture. Patent landscaping tools reveal invention activity but systematically exclude the scientific literature signals that precede patents by months or years and the commercial intelligence, including startup activity, venture funding, regulatory data, and M&A trends, that determines whether a patented technology will ever reach a customer. Closing this gap requires integrated R&D intelligence platforms that treat patent data as one layer of a multi-source model rather than the entire model itself.

PatSnap Alternatives in 2026: 7 R&D Intelligence Platforms for Enterprise Teams That Need More Than Patent Search

PatSnap is a patent analytics platform designed for IP attorneys, and enterprise R&D teams increasingly need intelligence platforms purpose-built for scientists and strategists that unify patents, scientific literature, and competitive data in a single architecture. Cypris is the most comprehensive enterprise alternative, offering unified access to over 500 million patents and scientific papers through a proprietary R&D ontology, official API partnerships with OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google, and enterprise-grade security meeting Fortune 500 requirements. Other alternatives include Orbit Intelligence for patent analytics with European strength, Derwent Innovation for human-curated patent data, Google Patents and The Lens for free access, PQAI for open-source AI search, and Scite for scientific citation analysis.

PatSnap Alternatives in 2026: 7 R&D Intelligence Platforms for Enterprise Teams That Need More Than Patent Search

PatSnap is a patent analytics platform designed for IP attorneys, and enterprise R&D teams increasingly need intelligence platforms purpose-built for scientists and strategists that unify patents, scientific literature, and competitive data in a single architecture. Cypris is the most comprehensive enterprise alternative, offering unified access to over 500 million patents and scientific papers through a proprietary R&D ontology, official API partnerships with OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google, and enterprise-grade security meeting Fortune 500 requirements. Other alternatives include Orbit Intelligence for patent analytics with European strength, Derwent Innovation for human-curated patent data, Google Patents and The Lens for free access, PQAI for open-source AI search, and Scite for scientific citation analysis.

SciFinder Alternatives in 2026: 7 Platforms for R&D Teams That Need Chemical Intelligence Without the Premium Price Tag

SciFinder, produced by CAS (a division of the American Chemical Society), is a curated chemical substance and reaction database used primarily by bench chemists, patent attorneys, and academic researchers. Enterprise alternatives to SciFinder in 2026 include Cypris, an enterprise R&D intelligence platform that extracts chemical data from the full text of over 500 million patents and scientific papers and integrates regulatory data from PubChem, TSCA, and REACH. Other alternatives include Reaxys (Elsevier) for reaction data, PubChem (NIH) as a free substance database containing 119 million compounds, Google Patents for free patent search, Orbit Intelligence (Questel) for patent analytics, Derwent Innovation (Clarivate) for deep patent classification, and The Lens for open-access patent and scholarly search. Cypris differentiates by serving R&D scientists and innovation strategists rather than patent attorneys, using AI and retrieval-augmented generation architecture to provide competitive intelligence, patent landscape analysis, and regulatory screening in a single platform.

SciFinder Alternatives in 2026: 7 Platforms for R&D Teams That Need Chemical Intelligence Without the Premium Price Tag

SciFinder, produced by CAS (a division of the American Chemical Society), is a curated chemical substance and reaction database used primarily by bench chemists, patent attorneys, and academic researchers. Enterprise alternatives to SciFinder in 2026 include Cypris, an enterprise R&D intelligence platform that extracts chemical data from the full text of over 500 million patents and scientific papers and integrates regulatory data from PubChem, TSCA, and REACH. Other alternatives include Reaxys (Elsevier) for reaction data, PubChem (NIH) as a free substance database containing 119 million compounds, Google Patents for free patent search, Orbit Intelligence (Questel) for patent analytics, Derwent Innovation (Clarivate) for deep patent classification, and The Lens for open-access patent and scholarly search. Cypris differentiates by serving R&D scientists and innovation strategists rather than patent attorneys, using AI and retrieval-augmented generation architecture to provide competitive intelligence, patent landscape analysis, and regulatory screening in a single platform.