Last March, the Circuit of The Americas in Austin, Texas, was home to the 2018 Pirelli World Challenge Grand Prix of Texas, a stage of this year’s edition of the Pirelli World Challenge. Currently in its 29th season, this Challenge consists of seven driver classifications and six classes of vehicles, often happening alongside the IndyCar Series on race event weekends.
It could just be another normal stage of this Challenge, if it was not for a very interesting partnership that happened between GMG Racing, a racing and car servicing company, and Loci, who developed a new way of handling intellectual property. This partnership saw the car of 22-year-old professional driver Alec Udell being sponsored by Loci, in order to draw attention for its revolutionary platform.
Loci developed LOCIsearch, which is a search engine focused on patent searching, which makes a process that is usually tedious and long really fast. With this, many of the inventors and creators that often have a hard time browsing patents to know if they should get one for their products, have much faster and more complete results with LOCIsearch.
The mastermind behind Loci (and current CEO), John Wise, is a former automotive engineer, so it is safe to say that this partnership was especially exciting for him. In fact, some of the inspiration for this company came from that background, in which he and his colleagues developed several new products which, due to the hurdles of the patenting process, never reached the market.
Wise was pleased to have his company sponsoring a car, commenting:
“Alec is an impressive guy who is a hell of a driver. He represents the people we are focused on collaborating with because he is an aspiring engineer and innovator.”
Loci believes that the automotive industry could certainly benefit from its platform, not only because more of its new and innovative products could be patented and reaching the market, but also because they would be able to do at a fraction of the traditional cost of the patent searching process.