The data file contains founding years for 142,110 U.S.-based assignees of USPTO patents granted between 1975 and 2021. This represents 85% of patents and 73% of assignees. The file also links to startups in PitchBook, a leading commercial data provider on venture capital and private equity.
The full list of variables in the file is below:
As noted above, the Assignee ID in this file is from June 2022. PatentsView updates their Assignee IDs (and Inventor IDs) with each release, and no crosswalk to previous Assignee IDs is provided. We therefore provide an additional version of the file with all Assignee-related fields from June 2022.
Citation
If you use the founding year or VC flag data in your research, please use the following cite:
Ewens, Michael and Matt Marx, "Entrepreneurial Patents", Working Paper 2023.If you use the IPO founding year data, please cite Jay Ritter’s work:
Ritter, Jay. "Initial Public Offerings: Updated Statistics", 2023 https://site.warrington.ufl.edu/ritter/ipo-data/If you use the gvkey data to identify public firms, please use the following cite for DISCERN:
Arora Ashish, Belenzon Sharon, & Sheer Lia. (2020). DISCERN: Duke Innovation & SCientific Enterprises Research Network [Data set]. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4320782License
These data are provided under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial 4.0 International License. See here for the OpenCorporates terms of use, which we believe are satisfied by our license as founding years were retrieved from OpenCorporates as described in the accompanying paper. PitchBook has granted permission for the vc_backed_assignee to be distributed as part of this dataset. We certify that no proprietary PitchBook data has been included in this release; rather, all fields have been compiled from public sources.
