Daniel Ruskin started his career when he was a mere 14 years old as an engineer for Coinbase. As he tells it, he was a teenager “who knew how to code and wanted to build cool things.”
Obviously too young to get a bank account, Ruskin did freelance development work he found on reddit in exchange for bitcoin. There he saw that Coinbase was hiring, and boldly sent the head of operations a cold email asking if he could work for the crypto exchange.
“Long story short, I ended up writing much of the early software that powered the Coinbase platform,” he tells TechCrunch. “I didn’t write the v0 codebase…but I did write a lot of software that brought us from 1 to 10.”
After four years at Coinbase, Ruskin decided to go to college and then to law school. He started a few startups along the way, including an election security company where he drafted and won a patent on its technology.
Frustrated with how “opaque” the patent process was, Ruskin in December 2024 launched a new Salt Lake City-based company called Inventex.
Ruskin, now 26, says Inventex wants to ease the process of “preparing and filing patent applications” by using a series of AI agents augmented by licensed attorneys. He believes that Inventex can help companies get patent-pending “10x faster” — in days, rather than months that a traditional firm might take.
The concept quickly attracted investors and after just one month, Ruskin had raised $2.4 million in a pre-seed round to grow Inventex. Conviction Capital, Coinbase co-founder Fred Ehrsam, and Cambrian Ventures co-led the financing, which also included participation from Boost and others. The money was raised via SAFEs at a $10 million valuation.
Inventex intakes the necessary technical data provided by its customers such as code, design documents, and technical specifications. It then identifies what its customers have invented that meet the legal requirements for patentability. This includes searching for prior art or what has been done before in that particular customer’s technical field, as well as “how our customer is different,” Ruskin said.
The company then drafts and files patent applications on behalf of the company in the United States and abroad.
Maksim Stepanenko, who worked with Ruskin at Coinbase, tells TechCrunch that Ruskin impressively started leading key payments infrastructure projects at the crypto company “soon” after he started while still a high school student. So when he heard about what Ruskin was doing with Inventex, he signed on as a small angel investor as part of the pre-seed financing.
“He’s thoughtful, fast-moving, and unusually good at navigating complex systems,” said Stepanenko, who is the founder of a startup called Operator. “I’ve been following his work ever since [working with him at Coinbase] and was excited to support his new company. [He’s] one of the most quietly impressive people I’ve worked with.”
‘More inbound than we can handle’
Besides speed, Ruskin claims Inventex’s approach gets its customers higher-quality patents too.
“We fine tune models specifically to each technical area, and our agents are true experts in each technical field our customers work in,” he said. Traditional patent attorneys, Ruskin believes, often do not understand the contours of the inventions they are protecting. The technical-expert agents are overseen, and refined, by licensed attorneys.
Ruskin is confident that Inventex has the right model to be innovative in this complex subset of legal services.
“Our competitors sell software as task-based automation to traditional law firms, and deployment is constrained by their incentives such as a billable-hour model, and the broader scheme of paying for expertise versus results,” he said. “We upend this by providing the end-to-end service.”
Inventex’s model is also generalizable, Ruskin claims. For example, he said Inventex is currently using one of its tools to automate MSPB (U.S. Merit Systems Protection Board) complaints for the tens of thousands of federal employees that were recently laid off.
“Traditional firms can’t support that kind of workload,” he said.
It’s early days yet but Inventex has about $250,000 of annual recurring revenue in the pipeline, according to Ruskin, including two publicly traded companies and numerous startups. Dirac is one that has given permission to be named.
“We have more inbound than we can handle,” Ruskin said.
Building unicorns
Ruskin also has expertise in the fintech space. He joined Checkr, a service for gig platforms to pay their workforce, in 2022. There, Ruskin says, he helped start Checkr Pay, “a startup within a startup.” During his time there, Ruskin hired a team of three engineers and “built and launched a neobank in about three to four months.” (Checkr raised $250 million at a $4.6 billion valuation in 2021.) Ruskin left that company in 2023 to finish law school at New York University, where he graduated in the top 10% of his class in 2024.
It was during his time at Checkr Pay that Ruskin got to know Cambrian Ventures’ solo GP Rex Salisbury, who described the young entrepreneur as the company’s “highest velocity engineer.”
“Ask the early Coinbase team and they’ll tell you the same thing, which is pretty remarkable given he was still in high school,” Salisbury told TechCrunch. “Daniel helped build two unicorns (Coinbase and Checkr) before graduating college and has since gone on to graduate law school and pass the patent bar. [He’s a] pretty rare combination of talent.”
He added: “At this early stage, you don’t evaluate a company purely on what it is, but on what it can be. It’s already remarkable what Daniel has built, but given his velocity what really excites me is how quickly he’s executed to build more.”
Making patents more accessible
Inventex has grown 2x per month since December primarily through word-of-mouth referrals and partnerships with VCs. The company charges customers a monthly fee to build a patent portfolio. The fee includes invention discovery, drafting, filing, and patent prosecution.
Presently, it has three full-time employees (all engineers) and several contract patent attorneys.
Inventex’s closest competitors are patent drafting tools like Edge and Solve, according to Ruskin.
Before Inventex, Ruskin founded Motif in July 2024, which had the same concept, but with a co-founder that “didn’t work out.”
Looking ahead, Ruskin is considering offering Inventex’s drafting toolkit as a white-labeled product for law firms so they can license its tools “to get their clients better patents, faster.”
“This aligns with our long-term vision for the field of patent law. Right now, 90% of the billable time for an initial patent filing is spent on drafting a disclosure; 10% is spent on strategy,” he said. “This will flip in five years — drafting will take 10% of the time, and strategy will be the differentiated service provided by firms. This ultimately brings the cost to file a patent down, and makes the system more accessible to innovators of any size.”
