SIPEx: SAXA
INTELLECTUAL
PROPERTY EXCHANGE

A New Paradigm for In-Licensing & Out-Licensing Life Science Patents

SAXA Equity Partners, LLC (SAXA) began as a private investment firm specializing in the acquisition and development of early-stage (pre-clinical) life science assets. As an outgrowth of that experience—in particular, sourcing the pipeline of potential portfolio assets—the company subsequently developed the SAXA Intellectual Property Exchange, or SIPEx.
SIPEx is a global online interactive marketplace servicing the needs of licensors and licensees of intellectual property, with an initial focus on the specific needs of the life sciences industry, including pharmaceuticals and biotechnology companies.

What We Do

Through its proprietary technology, SIPEx dramatically improves the efficiency of the intellectual property (IP) marketplace. The current inefficiencies in that marketplace are caused by the incomplete and diffuse nature of the information that is available regarding the universe of commercial IP assets. SIPEx greatly reduces these inefficiencies by providing an online platform for licensors and licensees to search for and review relevant intellectual property, and to negotiate and execute appropriate licensing agreements. Market players can now pursue these activities with far more efficiency than was previously possible.
SIPEx is poised to play a significant role in the evolution of the traditional market for IP assets, not only by making the transactional process much easier, but also by facilitating relationships between licensors and licensees via a comprehensive and secure online marketplace.

Who We Are

SAXA was founded by two entrepreneurial lawyers with over 50 years of combined experience in Big Pharma, finance, law, international tax, and government. Both are graduates of Georgetown University Law Center in Washington, DC. The company takes its name from the university’s Latin motto: “Hoya Saxa.”

Competitors?

There are at least a dozen websites today that appear to be online IP marketplaces. However, that appearance is misleading. Some of these sites are managed by brokers, who merely facilitate negotiations between licensors and licensees regarding assets previously identified by the parties. Other sites are simply bulletin boards, briefly listing IP for out-license and in-license, with additional information only available offline by contacting the listing entity. SIPEx, on the other hand, is unique–it is a bona fide exchange–not a broker or a bulletin board, that empowers the parties to identify target assets, negotiate key, terms and execute a contract.
In addition, all of the other websites suffer from at least one of two fatal flaws.

First, many if not all of the sites are designed as a “one size fits all” solution for the in-and out-licensing of multiple categories of IP. This does not work because the relevant commercial and financial criteria for the licensing of pharmaceutical patents are vastly different from those for the licensing of almost any other kind of IP. Thus, a single user interface that attempts to accommodate transactions for all types of IP actually accommodates none of them.
Second, none of the other exchanges have been designed in collaboration with a large pharmaceutical company. Unsurprisingly then, none of them are used by any large pharmaceutical companies. No matter how sophisticated a site, an exchange that was developed without input from its potentially most active users will not be sustainable in the long term. “Build it and they will come” in this context has been a recipe for failure.

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