Withings Patent Portfolio Analysis

One pulse, eleven years into the record

The Series B lands on 1 July 2020: $60 million, a single line in the record. By then Withings had been filing patents for eleven years and nine months. The first family went in on 13 October 2008. The four years after that produced exactly one family each. A team filing at that pace was not waiting for capital to begin. It had already begun, quietly, and kept going.

The pulse hides what sits on either side of it. Before it, sixty-one families filed between 2008 and 2019. After it, a filing rate that roughly doubled and then stayed there. The funding date is the easiest fact in this story to find and the least useful one. The dates that matter are the ones the company chose for itself, years earlier, with no announcement attached.

One hundred and ten of them survived

Every tick on the arc is one family: 148 in total. The solid amber ones, 110 of them, have been granted. The thin ones, 38, are published and still pending. That is a 74 percent grant share across a file built over seventeen years. Portfolios assembled quickly rarely hold that ratio. Examination removes the speculative claims first, and here most of the claims stayed.

The thin ticks cluster at one end, because pending means recent. Read the arc as a timeline and the pending third is largely the work of the last five years, still moving through offices. The solid section is the decade before the raise. Two different files, really, drawn on the same curve: one already tested, one still being argued.

Examination removes the speculative claims first, and here most of the claims stayed.

The rate changed, then it stayed changed

The bars for 2008 through 2012 are single filings. In 2013 the count jumps to seven and settles: nine, nine, nine, eight, nine across the years to 2018, then six in 2019. That is a steady habit, not a campaign. Then the funding marker, and 2020 comes in at fourteen. 2021 and 2022 both reach twenty. 2023 holds at eighteen. 2024 shows twelve.

The shading at the right edge is the publication lag. Three families are visible for 2025, which tells you almost nothing yet, because filings from the last eighteen months have not surfaced. What the completed bars do say is that the post-2020 rate was not a single burst. Four consecutive years above the entire pre-2020 average, sustained past the point where a raise stops explaining anything.

Who keeps arriving at these documents

Five organisations account for the heaviest citation traffic into this file. Apple Inc cites these filings 132 times. Fitbit Inc, 55. PureWick Corp, 54. Samsung Electronics Co Ltd, 45. Google LLC, 41. Citations are examiner and applicant references, nothing more. They record that when these parties filed, this French file came up.

Look at the shape of that list rather than the names. The top citer alone accounts for more references than the next two combined, and the second tier is not uniform in kind. Different sorts of organisation keep landing on the same 148 families. A file gets cited that often for one reason: it got there first and wrote the claims down.

Eight jurisdictions, chosen one at a time

The boxes are US, EP, CN, JP, FR, CA, AU and ES. Eight offices for a company of this size is a deliberate number. France is home and the first filing date sits there in the record. The US and EP are the expensive pair almost everyone pays for. China and Japan cost real money to prosecute and maintain, and they were paid for anyway.

Canada, Australia and Spain are the ones that tell you something. Nobody files in Spain by reflex. Those boxes are individual decisions, made family by family, about where a claim was worth having. Read together with a 74 percent grant share, this is not a portfolio assembled for a slide. It was assembled for offices where someone expected to need it.

Nobody files in Spain by reflex.

The newest titles do not match the old file

Here is the thing the earlier stages set up. The most recent published filings are a urine analysis device, a second urine analysis device, a cartridge for urine analysis, and a combined mirror and health metric output screen. The most recent of them dates to 26 September 2025. Those are titles from a file that has moved. The velocity did not just increase after 2020. It pointed somewhere new.

The decade of single-digit years built the grants. The four years above eighteen built the pending third. Withings began filing in 2008 and has kept three inventors, Eric Carreel, Thomas Droze and Cédric Hutchings, recurring across the file while 151 names in total have passed through it. Continuity of people, discontinuity of subject. That combination is what the last five years of this record actually shows.