Stephanie Curcio and James Stonehill founded the company on a bet that looked strange at the time — that large language models, then barely known outside research labs, could learn to read, understand, and analyze prior art. General models miss the nuance, so they built their own and called it NLPatent.

Patent research is foundational to so much of what a patent professional does, so everything since follows that conviction. The judgment belongs to the professional, and the person with the most context gets the most from the research — it shouldn't be the bottleneck. Clerq fits the way you already work — flexible search and intelligence tools for what you want your hands on, agents for what you'd rather assign — all built on the model that sits at the heart of the company.

To be the definitive platform for patent research.

Everything Clerq builds serves that single ambition — finding, reading, and analyzing the art, and returning it as work a professional can stand behind. It's research done to the standard the profession is held to, for the firms and in-house teams that use Clerq directly and the platforms that integrate it into products of their own. And it's done in a way that feels natural, aligned with how patent professionals think, never asking them to think like software.