UK-based AI startup Enginuity has raised £500,000 in fresh funding to accelerate its mission of unlocking the estimated $1.58 trillion in underused global intellectual property.

The round was led by Fuel Ventures, with participation from Symvan Capital and a group of angel investors.

Founded by innovation specialist Richard Heggie, Enginuity uses multi-agent artificial intelligence to map patents and research assets against real-time market demand signals. The platform aims to help corporates, universities, R&D teams and startups identify existing technologies that could solve current challenges but remain commercially dormant.

Global R&D spending exceeds $2.5 trillion annually, yet around 95 per cent of patents are never exploited, according to industry estimates. Enginuity argues that much of today’s innovation bottleneck stems not from a lack of ideas, but from difficulty in matching them with commercial opportunity.

The platform enables users to search intellectual property by function and feature, uncover related technologies and innovation pathways, and connect ideas directly to buyers, partners and funding sources.

Heggie said the company’s goal is to transform IP from a static legal asset into an active commercial resource. “The majority of the world’s ideas sit unused on the shelf,” he said. “By making IP searchable and commercially relevant, we help innovators save time and unlock value from what already exists.”

The funding will support product development, expansion of engineering and business development teams, and growth of partnerships across the UK, US and Europe.

Enginuity is already collaborating with innovation ecosystems linked to Cambridge, MIT/Harvard and the Technical University of Munich, and has piloted projects with venture studios including C10 Labs.

Mark Pearson, founder of Fuel Ventures, said the startup addresses a critical inefficiency in global innovation. “The waste of untapped IP is one of the biggest missed opportunities in technology,” he said. “Enginuity has the potential to transform how ideas are discovered and applied.”

With AI increasingly embedded in enterprise decision-making, Enginuity is positioning itself at the intersection of intellectual property analytics and commercialisation — aiming to turn dormant inventions into active economic drivers.

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Enginuity raises £500,000 to unlock $1.58tn in unused global innovation