Interlune Patent Portfolio Analysis

Five million, and one filing already made

The pulse is a $5M Seed, announced on 14 September 2026. Mana Ventures, the National Science Foundation, Liquid 2 Ventures, Gaingels and Seven Seven Six are on the round. Interlune was founded in 2020, which means six years passed between incorporation and this announced raise. Seed rounds usually arrive before the paperwork. Here the order runs the other way.

The company's first patent filing is dated 19 December 2023. That is thirty-three months before the funding event you are looking at. It is also the most recent published filing on record, which tells you nothing about what was filed in 2024 or 2025, only that nothing from those years has surfaced yet. Publication lags. The visible record stops in December 2023.

Nothing granted, everything still in motion

The granted ribbon is empty. One family exists, published and pending, filed at WO. Zero per cent granted. The title on record is a lunar regolith processing system for mining and beneficiation. That is the whole of the visible estate: one application, one title, no issued claims, no enforceable scope.

This is not a weakness so much as a clock. An application filed in December 2023 sits in the ordinary window where a first grant becomes plausible around now. Until then the company holds a priority date and a disclosure, which is a claim on a moment in time rather than on a technology. The skew you see is what an early-stage record looks like before the office answers.

A priority date is a claim on a moment, not yet on a technology.

Two dots, and both on the same page

Two inventors are named across the entire portfolio: Gary Lai and Harrison H Schmitt. Lai is on one of one. So is Schmitt. There is no second family to compare them across, no pattern of one name recurring while others rotate through. The concentration is total because the denominator is one.

That matters for what it implies about where the technical thinking sits. A single application with two authors is a document, not a programme. Meanwhile the company lists thirty-four open roles, thirteen of them in hardware, alongside a senior materials scientist, a mechanical engineer and an electrical engineer. The hiring is pointed at building the kind of thing the filing describes. Whether that generates more filings is the open part.

Large circles, and a lot of empty space

Interlune's claims cluster in E21C. Across the last five years, the other assignees filing in those same CPC groups are Lunar Helium 3 Mining with six families, Salvino Chris with four, Trans Astronautica with three, and Guangdong Industrial Univ, Shanghai Eng Ct Microsatellites and Harbin Inst with two each. Those are the big circles on this scale. Six is the top of the chart.

Read the axis before reading the gap. In most classification groups worth entering, the leaders hold dozens or hundreds of families. Here the leader holds six, and two of the six named filers are universities or institutes. Interlune's single family is small in absolute terms and not far off the median for the space. The room is open because almost nobody has filled it.

One citation, arriving before the grant

A single node connects back: Inst Geology & Geophysics Cas has cited these filings once. That is the entire citation record, and it arrived while the application is still pending. Citations before grant are the earliest external signal a portfolio produces. Someone reading the published document found it relevant enough to put on the record.

One citation is one citation. It does not measure importance and it does not confer anything. What it does establish is that the December 2023 disclosure has been read outside the company, in an institution that files in the same technical territory. For a portfolio of one unggranted family, that is the only outside evidence that the document exists in the field's memory at all.

Whether a date can hold a territory

Here is the thread pulled tight. Interlune's advantage is not scale and not breadth. It is sequence. The filing predates the announced money by thirty-three months, and it sits in a classification group where the busiest filer of the past five years holds six families. Being early in a thin space is a different kind of asset from being large in a crowded one.

It is also a fragile one. A priority date only holds territory if something follows it: a grant with claims worth the scope, and further filings behind the first. The record stops in December 2023. The hiring says the work did not. Everything that decides this is either inside the patent office or inside the publication lag.

Being early in a thin space is a different asset from being large in a crowded one.