Plus.ai Patent Portfolio Analysis

One pulse, two hundred million dollars

February 2021. A Series B of $200 million, announced in a single moment. On a timeline this is the loudest thing that happens to Plus.ai, and it is the event most readers would treat as the beginning of the story.

It is not the beginning. The company's first patent filing is dated 6 June 2017, three and a half years earlier. Between that date and this pulse, a substantial body of work was already lodged with patent offices and ticking through examination. The money arrived into something, not onto empty ground.

Two hundred and thirty-one ticks

Each mark is one family. There are 231 of them. The solid amber marks are the 108 that have been granted; the thin ones are the 123 still published and pending. That is a grant rate of 47 percent, with roughly half the portfolio still moving through offices somewhere.

A pending half is not a weakness. It is a statement about age. Filings take years to resolve, and a portfolio where half the arc is still thin is a portfolio whose recent years were busy. The most recent published filing carries a date of 3 December 2025.

Half the arc has not finished being decided yet.

The bar that dwarfs the funding year

Sixteen families in 2017. Two in 2018. Then 2019: seventy-one. That single bar is the tallest in the record by a wide margin, more than three times the year before or after. The funding marker sits two years to its right, in 2021, where the bar reads twenty-nine.

Read the order carefully. The heaviest filing year precedes the Series B, not follows it. Whatever the company decided to protect, it decided in 2019 and committed the cost then. The capital landed on a portfolio whose shape had already been set.

Vehicle control carries almost half

B60W, vehicle control, appears on 102 of the 231 families. Nothing else comes close. G06F data processing sits at 43, G06T image processing at 42, G06V image recognition at 41, G05D at 30, G01C at 25. The bands overlap, because families carry more than one classification.

The perception groups together are large, but they are distributed across four codes. Control is a single concentrated block. Recent titles match it: a method for controlling the median position of an automatic driving vehicle, a driver behavior evaluation and prediction method based on driving scene, an automatic trailer width measurement method.

The weight sits on control, not on seeing.

Who keeps arriving at these documents

Four organisations account for the citations drawn here. TESLA INC has cited these filings 42 times. WAYMO LLC 27. GM GLOBAL TECH OPERATIONS LLC 26. GM CRUISE HOLDINGS LLC 24. That is 119 citations from four names, pointing back at a portfolio built largely by a company whose peak filing year was 2019.

Citation is not endorsement and it is not conflict. It is a record of examiners and drafters finding this work when they searched the same ground. The 2019 documents have been in the public record long enough to be found repeatedly, which is what an early filing date buys you.

What the ordering actually proves

The plain version: Plus.ai filed its heaviest year of patents in 2019, and the $200 million arrived in February 2021. Seventy-one families were lodged before the raise, sixteen more before that in 2017. The capital did not create the position. It found one.

152 inventors are named across the portfolio, with CUI DIXIAO on 29 families, ZHENG HAO on 23 and DALY JR TIMOTHY PATRICK on 21. Filing continued after the raise too, fifty families in 2022. But the priority dates that matter most were set when the company was still small.