SigmaSense Patent Portfolio Analysis

The money came seven years late

The pulse is dated 1 March 2023: a $37.9M round. The first filing in this record is dated 21 June 2016. That is six years and eight months of filing before the announcement, and it was not a trickle. Twenty-five families carry a first filing year of 2019. Twenty-six carry 2021, the peak. Nineteen carry 2022. The money arrived after the work, not before it.

Counted properly, ninety-nine of the one hundred and nine families have a first filing year of 2022 or earlier. Ten come after. So the round did not fund the invention; it landed on top of an existing record. Whatever conviction built this was funded some other way, and it was sustained through 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021 and 2022 without a break.

The money arrived after the work, not before it.

Ninety-seven decided, twelve still open

Split the record by status and it goes lopsided immediately. Ninety-seven families granted. Twelve published and still pending. Eighty-nine percent of the whole thing has already been through examination and come out the other side. Most records at this size look the other way around, with a thick band of live applications and a thin band of allowed ones. Here the pending band is the remainder, not the body.

That ratio is a consequence of the dates. Filings that started in 2018 and 2019 have had years in prosecution. The most recent published filing is dated 12 December 2025, and the tail years are small: eight families first filed in 2023, two in 2024. The record is mostly settled. What remains open is a narrow edge, not the substance.

Thirty-eight dots, three of them lit

Thirty-eight people are named as inventors across the record. Three of them account for almost all of it. Van Ostrand Daniel Keith appears on eighty-one families. Seger Jr Richard Stuart on seventy-three. Gray Patrick Troy on fifty-five. Against one hundred and nine families total, that is not a research department with a few prolific members. That is two or three people at the centre of nearly every filing.

The other thirty-five names fill in around them. Read the recent titles and the same hands are visible in the subject matter: drive sense circuit, touch sensor noise prediction and cancellation, spatial filtering a touch signal of a touch screen display, touch sensor device with differentiated priority sensing region. Narrow ground, worked repeatedly, by a group small enough to fit around one table.

That is two or three people at the centre of nearly every filing.

One hundred and nine against three thousand

Now the scale. Over the last five years, other assignees filing in the same CPC groups include SAMSUNG ELECTRONICS CO LTD with 3,542 families, BEIJING ZITIAO NETWORK TECHNOLOGY CO LTD with 1,798, APPLE INC with 1,786, SAMSUNG DISPLAY CO LTD with 1,530, HUAWEI TECH CO LTD with 1,431 and RONGYAO TERMINAL CO LTD with 1,099. SigmaSense has one hundred and nine families in total, across its whole history.

On the same axis the small circle is very small. But the comparison is between a five-year count for the largest filers and a nine-year total for a group of three principal inventors. These are not the same kind of number. One describes the traffic in a classification. The other describes what a handful of people chose to file, and finished filing, before the funding was announced.

Who reads back into this record

Four organisations cite these filings most often. SYNAPTICS INC has cited them twenty-two times. MRI INC twenty times. APPLE INC eighteen. NOVATEK MICROELECTRONICS CORP sixteen. Each of those is a line drawn back into the record from somewhere else. Apple appears here and also appears among the large filers in the same CPC groups, which is worth noticing for what it is: the same name on both sides of the picture.

Citations are not permission and not conflict. They are a record of attention. Seventy-six citations from four organisations, pointing at families filed largely between 2018 and 2022 by three named inventors, is the clearest external signal in the file that the narrow ground was worth occupying. That is the story: the filings were early, concentrated, and examined, and other people were reading them.

What concentration buys, and what it costs

A record like this one is a bet placed twice. Once on subject matter, held for nine years across four offices. Once on people, three of whom appear on the majority of everything filed. The first bet has already been settled by examiners: ninety-seven grants out of one hundred and nine families. The second has not been settled by anyone, and cannot be read off the file.

So the facts land in a specific shape. Early dates, a tight inventor core, a high grant rate, a small tail of recent filings, and four organisations citing back. That is a defensible position built by a small group before the capital arrived. What it is not, yet, is a position that survives the departure of the three dots that are lit.