Ideaship and Spren: The Story of Patent Equity Investment

Startups with patents raise more capital than their non-patented peers. Ideaship helps founding teams, like Jason Moore and his team at Spren, build enterprise value via their IP.

Entrepreneurship runs in Jason Moore’s family. Long before the internet, his father, a self-taught programmer and engineer who grew up dirt poor in the shadow of Texas oil refineries, invented networking gear that for the first time let chain stores share data on sales and returns. It was clear early on that Moore shared his father’s gene for innovation. “I’ve been tinkering with business ideas pretty much since I was a teenager,” Moore says. “Lots of them were stupid, but it was all fun.” His best one from his college days: a forum of forums, which someone else turned into Reddit. He abandoned the idea after a roommate at the time said it would never work. But Moore, 35, persevered. In the last few years, he’s built two of the world’s most popular health apps: Spren and Elite HRV. Backed by 100 university research labs, Moore’s apps measure body fat, muscle, heart rate variability (HRV), and much more, using just the camera on a smartphone or a wearable monitor, like a $30 chest strap.

It started with HRV, a biomarker that measures imperceptible variations in heart beats. Research shows that high variability is a sign of good health, while low variability is associated with stress and fatigue, which can lead to injury. Moore learned that HRV is a reliable measure of how well the autonomic nervous system—the body’s main control grid—is functioning. HRV reveals the body’s response to exercise, illness, inflammation, stress, and mental health. Moore’s company, Spren, based in Asheville, North Carolina, has expanded from HRV into other markers.

Spren’s tool uses digital photos to determine composition of fat and lean muscle. The key is a Spren algorithm that compares the photos to vast databases built with more costly, invasive measures of body fat, like caliper measurements, X-ray scans, and underwater weighing. Venture capitalists have taken notice. Ideaship, a venture fund in Portland, Oregon, that provides patent expertise in exchange for equity stakes in young companies, signed with Spren in 2019. In 2022 it made a cash follow-on investment as part of Spren’s $11 million seed raise. “Spren is changing the way health-conscious people improve their fitness,” said Michael Lubitz, Ideaship’s Founder and Managing Director. “Larger companies are eyeing biomarkers for their health applications and we’re pretty certain that Spren is on their radar.” Moore wanted patent protection for his technology, but, as a startup, he didn’t have the tens of thousands of dollars it takes to do patents right. Enter Ideaship and its parent company, Global Technology Transfer Group.

Startups seeking patents raise more capital than their non-patent-seeking peers

Moore’s idea for Spren germinated when he was doing something distinctly non-entrepreneurial. After graduating from Texas A&M University with a degree in information and operations management, he went to work at Marathon Oil Co. in Houston. The job taught him the value of measurement and data. He worked on a team that analyzed gigabytes of sensor data from Marathon’s oilfield equipment to optimize its performance. He became an expert in SAP, the powerful— and notoriously difficult—business software.

“We were saving lives—and billions of dollars—by doing preventive maintenance,” Moore says. Start-up fever still gripped Moore while he sat at his desk. A soccer player in college, he renewed his interest in fitness. His parents struggled with their weight, and he felt like he was slowing down. Never one to do anything at half speed, Moore became a health and fitness instructor on the side. “I went down the rabbit hole on different things you can measure about the body,” Moore says. That led him to HRV. At the time, only leading-edge researchers and coaches were using it, mostly as a warning sign for injury. Moore’s roommate at the time was a coder, and Moore convinced him to help write an app that would track HRV using chest-strap heart monitors. In 2014, they each put $500 in a bank account and went for it. They called the app Elite HRV and made it free. Two months later, they had 1,000 users.

The app spread by word of mouth. A few months later, Scotland’s national rugby team called and asked Moore to come to Edinburgh to talk about HRV. A year after launch, Elite HRV had 18,000 users. Moore communicated with thousands of them on nights and weekends. In the middle of it all, Moore married Alyssa Barker, an engineer at Marathon who worked at an in-house startup. They spent a year traveling the world. At many stops, they met with people about HRV. On the way home from Asia, they stopped at the UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital in Oakland, California, and talked to counselors there about how HRV changed when kids were being abused. Children are good at hiding stress, Moore learned, and HRV gave doctors and parents a new window into the ill-effects on their bodies and minds. “Kids have lots of health issues from the trauma underneath the surface, and you can’t see it from the outside because they learn to stay stone faced,” Moore says.