Jeffrey Tiong

Founder and Chief Executive Officer PatSnap

Last Reviewed: September 18, 2026

Executive Summary

Jeffrey Tiong is the founder and Chief Executive Officer of PatSnap, a Singapore-headquartered innovation intelligence platform that indexes and analyses well over a hundred million patents together with litigation records, licensing data and company information, and sells the result to research and development teams, intellectual property departments and drug-discovery groups. The company began as a student’s frustration: on a year-long overseas internship in Philadelphia’s Bio Valley in 2005, Tiong – then a biomedical engineering undergraduate – was asked to search technical information in patents and found the process messy and close to unintelligible even for someone with the relevant scientific training. He built a patent search engine to fix it, founded PatSnap around it in 2007, and has led the company since, taking it from four people to roughly 1,400 and past US$100 million in annual recurring revenue. A US$300 million Series E backed by SoftBank Vision Fund 2 and Tencent made PatSnap the first unicorn produced by the National University of Singapore’s startup ecosystem.

Career Highlights

• Founded PatSnap in 2007 and has been its chief executive throughout.
• Grew the company from a four-person operation into an organization of roughly 1,400 people.
• Raised a US$300 million Series E from investors including SoftBank Vision Fund 2 and Tencent, crossing the US$1 billion valuation threshold.
• Made PatSnap the first unicorn to emerge from NUS’s startup support ecosystem, having taken incubation and grant support from NUS Enterprise at the outset.
• Expanded into China through the NUS Suzhou Research Institute and the BLOCK71 network.
• Took the business past US$100 million in annual recurring revenue.
• Named EY Entrepreneur Of The Year 2018 for Singapore, then represented Singapore at the EY World Entrepreneur Of The Year final in Monte Carlo in 2019.
• Awarded the Singapore Computer Society’s IT Leader Award in 2019 and, earlier, the NUS Outstanding Young Alumni Award.
• Now serves as a judge for EY Entrepreneur Of The Year Singapore.

Professional Journey

Tiong was born in Sabah, Malaysia, and studied biomedical engineering at the National University of Singapore’s Faculty of Engineering. The decisive experience of his education was not a course but a placement: through the NUS Overseas Colleges programme he spent a year in 2005 interning in Bio Valley, Philadelphia, the biotechnology corridor around the University of Pennsylvania. Part of the job was searching patents for technical information, and he found it near-impossible to do well – opaque, badly structured and hostile to anyone trying to understand a technology landscape rather than litigate a single filing. He decided to build his own patent search engine.

PatSnap was founded in 2007, with incubation and grant support from NUS Enterprise. The early years were slow and, by Tiong’s own public account, difficult; he has spoken openly about extended periods of self-doubt and described himself as an introverted person building a company that demanded the opposite temperament. The product’s expansion was geographic as well as functional: the company pushed into China through the NUS Suzhou Research Institute and the BLOCK71 network, giving it access to the world’s largest source of new patent filings.

The platform broadened well beyond search. PatSnap positions itself as innovation intelligence rather than patent software, combining patent data with litigation, licensing, funding and company information so that R&D and IP teams can assess a technology landscape, a competitor’s position or a molecule’s freedom to operate in one place. Life sciences and drug discovery became a major vertical alongside industrial R&D, and the company layered AI-driven analysis over the underlying corpus.

Recognition arrived in the late 2010s: EY named him Entrepreneur Of The Year for Singapore in 2018, and he went on to represent Singapore at EY’s world final in Monte Carlo in 2019, the same year the Singapore Computer Society gave him its IT Leader Award. The financial validation followed with a US$300 million Series E led by SoftBank Vision Fund 2 with Tencent participating, which carried PatSnap past a US$1 billion valuation and made it the first unicorn to come out of NUS’s startup pipeline – a milestone the university itself publicised. By 2024 the company had surpassed US$100 million in annual recurring revenue with a workforce of around 1,400.

Tiong continues to lead the company and has taken on a role judging EY’s Entrepreneur Of The Year programme in Singapore, alongside angel investing in early-stage Southeast Asian companies.

Education

National University of Singapore

Bachelor’s degree, Biomedical Engineering, NUS Faculty of Engineering

NUS Overseas Colleges, Bio Valley programme, Philadelphia

Year-long entrepreneurship internship placement in biomedical technology and entrepreneurship, 2005