YellowDog protect and extend with IP for Growth – IP006

YellowDog provides cloud-based and on-premises workload management services to a wide range of sectors including Financial Services, Life Sciences, AI/ML and Engineering, enabling customers to easily spread their high-compute workloads across multiple clouds and on-premises. The YellowDog Platform is a user-friendly portal, allowing workload scheduling across clouds, and synthesizing of cloud and on-premises compute instances into a single, manageable cluster.

The challenge

Since the company's founding in 2015, the business has evolved significantly. Their original platform and service catered to the media industry, specifically animation, CGI and visual effects companies. Throughout the following two years, the business pivoted towards other sectors including Financial Services, Life Sciences, and Engineering. To facilitate this, they released a new, more advanced platform and developed their scaling and workload management functionalities.

The platform can now run at the greatest scale of all other similar platforms in the market. This achievement, and the ability of their scheduler to cope with such scales, means they are more vulnerable to competitors mimicking the platform's capabilities.

Taking action

In order to protect their solution from imitation, they wanted to identify elements of their platform which they could patent, register for these, and develop a strategy to ensure future proofing of these assets. This is where their involvement in Intellectual Property for Growth came in.

Intellectual Property for Growth is a grant scheme offered by West of England Growth Hub, where eligible businesses can access up to £8,000 to help them secure their IP.

After a successful application, YellowDog were awarded funding towards commissioning an audit of their IP assets and follow-on funding to implement the recommended actions.

They also aimed to use the funding to train two of their staff on IP Management so they could continue to champion this capability, as well as continuing to upskill and review their IP Management processes as their business grows. For YellowDog, this grant represented a significant opportunity to protect their USP as they entered into exciting, large-scale engagements.

Prior to the audit the company was aware that trademark protection for the “YellowDog” name and logo was in place in the UK, but the logo wasn’t protected in the US. The grant helped the business to add this protection.

Additionally, prior to the audit, the business was unaware that they could protect their application’s user interface design, this has now been granted for the UK. The focus of the IP report was to file a UK patent to protect their novel machine learning technology which predicts and reacts to customer computing capacity demands. This patent was granted in August in the UK, and the company has subsequently filed for US and European protection for its technology.