Patent portfolios should be made with purpose.
So we built Ornition.
Our team brings together decades of experience using IP to drive business forward, including patent prosecution and strategy, world-wide patent litigation, and secure technology deployment.
We have lived the challenge. And we know other IP tools don’t live up to the promise of AI. At Ornition, we are building a new foundation for how serious patent portfolios are developed in an AI world.
Ornition
From the Greek ornis — bird. The view from above.
Order
The structure. A company’s information and human insight, brought together—over time—into an organized and usable format.
Cognition
The intelligence. Reasoning and insight across a company’s ideas, art, filings, and history as one connected body of knowledge.
As Senior Director of Intellectual Property at Sonos for over a decade, Chris has led a team that built one of the most powerful patent portfolios in consumer electronics and played a key role in patent litigation. Before Sonos, he spent six years in patent prosecution and litigation at a Chicago-based IP law firm. Today, he also regularly advises and invests in disruptive technology growth companies. He is a registered patent attorney and a named inventor on over 50 patents. Before law, he co-founded and ran a web services and networking company. Chris’s strategies for developing litigation-worthy patent portfolios are engrained in Ornition’s architecture, intelligence, and workflows.
B.A. in Physics with a minor in Business, Illinois Wesleyan University | B.S. in Electrical Engineering, Washington University in St. Louis
J.D., Northwestern School of Law
Chris Butts, CEO and Co-Founder
Matt co-founded NMI and served as its technical leader for 22 years. He built the security first payment gateway from its first lines of code into infrastructure that processes billions of transactions for banks, processors and merchants, backed by successive investments from several private equity firms. He builds systems that enterprises trust with what they cannot afford to lose. Matt’s experience deploying complex technical architectures securely and at scale make Ornition the dependable platform for your company’s most sensitive information.
Matt Schmidgall, CTO and Co-Founder
Jonathan was the 7th employee at Sonos, where he spent over 15 years building the patent portfolio and running an Innovation team, while playing contributing roles in product, engineering, and manufacturing. He is a named inventor on over 200 patents. Since 2018, he has been providing IP portfolio development services with early stage companies to discover and capture the IP that differentiates their products to support their growing business. Before Sonos, Jonathan was a networking engineer at multiple deep technology startups. Jonathan’s product-focused and innovation-strategy lens on portfolio development enhances Ornition’s capability to build portfolios that drive businesses forward.
B.S. in Electrical Engineering, UC San Diego
Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering, UC Santa Barbara
Jonathan Lang, Co-Founder
Mark has spent 26 years building patent portfolios that hold up. He is Deputy General Counsel at Sonos, where he has led intellectual property, licensing, and litigation since 2011. Before Sonos, he spent nine years as VP of Patents at Trading Technologies, building its portfolio from scratch into some of the most litigated patents in technology. The method he developed there, and rebuilt at Sonos, is the foundation of Ornition. He is a registered patent attorney and a named inventor on over 30 patents, and also advises startups on patent strategy.
B.S. Mechanical Engineering and Electrical Engineering, University of Illinois
J.D., Loyola University Chicago
Mark Triplett, Co-Founder