Daniel Ruskin began his career when he was just 14 years old as a engineer for Coinbase. As he says, he was a teenager “who knew how to codify and wanted to build cool things”.
Apparently too young to get a bank account, Ruskin did a development work he found on Reddit in return for Bitcoin. There he saw that Coinbase was hiring and boldly sent the head of business a cold email asking if he could work to exchange encryption.
“A long story short, I ended up writing much of the early software that supplied the Coinbase platform,” says TechCrunch. “I didn’t write V0 Codebase … but I wrote 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 the Law School. Launched some newly established businesses along the way, including an electoral security company where he is drawn up and won A patent for his technology.
Frustrated with how “opaque” the patent diploma was, Ruskin in December 2024 launched a new Salt Lake City -based company called Inventor.
Ruskin, now 26 years old, says inventex wants to facilitate the process of preparing and applying for patents using a series of AI agents increasing by licensed lawyers. He believes that inventex can help companies get their “10X faster” diploma-in days, and not months that a traditional business can take.
The idea quickly attracted investors, and after just a month, Ruskin had raised $ 2.4 million in a pre-duplicate to develop Inventex. Capital Capital, co -founder of Coinbase Fred Ehrsam and Cambrian Ventures, has funded me, which also included the participation of Boost and others. Money increased through funding with $ 10 million.
Inventex recruits the necessary technical data provided by its customers, such as code, design documents and technical specifications. It then determines what its customers invented the legal requirements for patent is invented. This includes the search for previous art or what has been done before this particular customer’s technical field, as well as “how our client is different”, Ruskin said.
The company then designs and archives applications for patents on behalf of the company in the United States and abroad.
Maksim Stepanenko, who worked with Ruskin on Coinbase, tells Techcrunch that Ruskin began to lead the basic infrastructure projects in the “soon” encryption company “soon” after he was still a high school student. So, when he heard what Ruskin did with Inventex, he signed as a small Angel investor as part of the funding.
“He is careful, fast and unusually good at navigation in complex systems,” said Stepanenko, who is the founder of a start -up Operator. ‘I have attended his work since [working with him at Coinbase] And he was excited to support his new company. [He’s] One of the quietest impressive people I worked with. ”
‘More incoming than we can handle’
In addition to speed, Ruskin claims that Inventex’s approach also gets the highest quality customers.
“We coordination models especially in every technical sector and our agents are true experts in every technical field in which our customers work,” he said. Traditional patent lawyers, Ruskin believes, often do not understand the outlines of the inventions they protect. Technicians-priest agents are supervised, and sophisticated, by licensed lawyers.
Ruskin is convinced that Inventex has the right model to be innovative in this complex subset of legal services.
“Our competitors sell software as automation based on work in traditional law firms and growth is limited by their motives, such as a debit time model and the wider payment plan for expertise over the results,” he said. “We increase this by providing the service from end to end.”
Inventex’s model is also generalized, Ruskin claims. For example, he said that Inventex is currently using one of its tools to automate MSPB (US Merit Systems Protection) complaints for the tens of thousands of recently fired federal employees.
“Traditional businesses cannot support this type of workload,” he said.
It is first days, but Inventex has about $ 250,000 annual recurring revenue, according to Ruskin, including two companies negotiating on the Stock Exchange and numerous newly established companies. Dirac is the one who has given permission to be named.
“We have more incoming than we can handle,” Ruskin said.
Built -in
Ruskin also has expertise in the fintech. He joined the checkr, a GIG platform service to pay their workforce in 2022. There, Ruskin says, helped to start paying the check, “a start in a start”. During his time there, Ruskin hired a team of three engineers and “was built and started a neobank in about three to four months”. (Checkr set $ 250 million In an assessment of $ 4.6 billion in 2021.) Ruskin left the company in 2023 to complete the Law School at the University of New York, where he graduated at the top 10% of his order in 2024.
It was during his time at Checkr Pay that Ruskin was aware of the Cambrian Ventures GP solo Rex Salisbury, who described the young entrepreneur as a “higher speed engineer” of the company.
“Ask the early coinbase team and they will tell you the same thing, which is quite remarkable as it was still in high school,” Salisbury told TechCrunch. “Daniel helped build two unicorns (Coinbase and Checkr) before graduating at college and has since gone to graduate the Law School and pass the patent bar. [He’s a] Quite rare combination of talent. ”
He added: “At this early stage, you do not evaluate a company exclusively on what it is, but to what it may be. It is already remarkable what Daniel has built, but given the speed that really excites me is how fast it performs to build more.”
Making patents more affordable
Inventx has grown twice a month since December mainly through references and partnerships with Word-of-Mouth and collaborations with VCS. The company charges customers a monthly remuneration for the construction of a patent portfolio. The end includes the discovery of the invention, the pension, the filing and the prosecution of patents.
Currently, it has three full -time employees (all engineers) and several patents.
The closest competitors of Inventex are patents to draw up such as Edge and SolveAccording to Ruskin.
Prior to Inventex, Ruskin founded Motif in July 2024, which had the same idea, but with a co -founder who “did not work”.
Looking forward, Ruskin is considering offering Devertex’s toolkit as a white highlighted product for law firms so they can grant permission to use his tools “to obtain the best patents of their customers”.
“This is in line with our long -term vision of the patent law. At the moment, 90% of the debit time for an initial patent diploma is spent on the retirement of revelation; 10% is spent on strategy,” he said. “This will be reversed in five years – the pension will last 10% of the time and the strategy will be the differentiated service provided by businesses.
