Key findings
Nearly three quarters of the patent suits brought against software companies came from NPEs, compared with 56.0% across all 24 industries in the dataset.
Ninety seven separate NPEs filed against software defendants in a single year. None of them sells a product, so there is no infringing product to countersue over, and a portfolio held for deterrence does little work against this group.
Most suits land on companies with no public listing rather than on the largest technology firms, and 137 such defendants absorbed 151 of the 247 cases.
Quarterly filings doubled across eight quarters, and NPE volume supplied 27 of the 36 additional cases.
What this cannot tell you. The dataset records filings, parties and asserted patents, not results, so settlement rates, IPR institution rates and dismissal figures all fall outside it. Nothing here describes what a matter costs to defend or how it ends.
Using this on a live matter
Three questions answerable from public records in the first hour after a complaint or demand letter arrives, and what each answer usually means in this industry.
Was the patent assigned after issue?
Acquired patents account for 80.2% of NPE assertions and 37.9% of operating company assertions. That 42 point spread is the widest of any attribute measured here. Acquisition history is worth checking first, on the face of the patent and in the recorded assignments, remembering that recordation is voluntary and shell transfers are not always on file.
How old is the patent?
NPE assertions reach court a median 10.6 years after grant, against 5.1 years for operating companies. The two medians sit five years apart, so age alone separates the populations reasonably well. Age does not cap exposure on its own, and past damages reach back as far as six years by statute whatever the grant date.
How big is the family?
Operating companies assert from families twice the size, a median of 10 against 5, and 56.2% of their patents are continuations. A live continuation chain means new claims can still issue against a shipping product, while a closed chain fixes the scope at what has already granted.
Who is doing the asserting
above the all industry NPE average, the widest gap of any industry with more than 100 cases.
Financial services and telecommunications sit higher, at 89.7% and 87.5%, on 68 and 64 classified cases against 235 for software and internet. Several smaller industries run higher still on very thin volume, with education reaching 100% across eight cases.
At the other end of the same period, pharmaceuticals recorded no NPE filings at all and medical devices recorded them in 24.1% of cases.
The 73.6% headline excludes the 12 unclassified cases, and counting all 247 filings brings the NPE share to 70.0%.
What a defensive portfolio reaches
A portfolio held for deterrence works by giving the other side something to lose if it is sued back. The mechanism needs an opponent whose own products can infringe.
software companies sued here appear anywhere in this data as an asserting party.
The 97 NPEs that filed against software defendants over these 12 months all hold patents they do not practice. Invalidity and non infringement defenses work normally against them. Because an entity that sells nothing has no infringing sales to accuse and no revenue to support a damages award, a countersuit on the defendant's own patents has no target.
Counterassertion stays rare in this industry even among defendants large enough to fund it, which leaves invalidity and prior art doing most of the defensive work.
Deterrence bears on the 26.4% of matters that operating companies bring, and the remaining 73.6% arrive from parties a portfolio cannot reach.
Who is getting sued
Nine companies with market capitalization above $200 billion absorbed 31 of the 247 cases. Another 137 companies with no public listing absorbed 151 between them, or 61% of the industry total.
Cases by defendant size
247 cases across 200 distinct software and internet defendants.
The largest companies do face more suits apiece, 3.4 each against 1.1 across the rest of the industry, though that rate applies to only nine of them. The 137 privately held defendants account for more than three times as many cases in total.
What they assert on
Most asserted patents carry a primary CPC subclass, and three subclasses account for 62% of everything brought against software defendants.
Asserted patents by technology area
488 patents with a primary CPC classification, split by asserting party type.
G06F24.2% of asserted patentsG06Q22.5% of asserted patentsH04L15.2% of asserted patentsH04N6.6%G06T4.9%H04M4.5%H04W3.3%G06N1.4%Two kinds of asserted patent
Patents asserted by NPEs differ from those asserted by operating companies on attributes visible in the public record. The gaps below are wide enough to support a first read before anyone opens the claims.
| Attribute | Asserted by NPEs | Asserted by op. co. | Spread |
|---|---|---|---|
| Share acquired rather than original | 80.2% | 37.9% | −42.3 pts |
| Median years from grant to suit | 10.6 | 5.1 | 2.1× |
| Average simple family size | 9.2 | 18.3 | 2.0× |
| Median simple family size | 5 | 10 | 2.0× |
| Share that are continuations | 33.7% | 56.2% | +22.5 pts |
Two years of filings
Cases filed per quarter against software and internet defendants
By asserting party type. 2026 Q3 is partial and the data ends 20 July 2026.
Quarterly volume doubled across eight quarters, from 34 cases in 2024 Q3 to 70 in 2026 Q2, with a peak of 83 in 2025 Q4. Filings by operating companies stayed between 10 and 22 a quarter across those eight quarters, with no comparable rise. NPE volume rose from 23 to 50 over that span, while operating company filings added five. A forecast built on total filings therefore tracks NPE behavior far more closely than it tracks competitive risk.
Recent assertions by operating companies
Most patent suits against software companies come from NPEs rather than from competitors. Each of the three below is a company with a product suing another company with a product, and all were filed between April and June.
- Competitive
Samsara Inc. v. Motive Technologies, Inc.
1 patent · fleet telematics · two direct competitors in one category
- Competitive
InVue Security Products Inc. v. Indyme Solutions, LLC
3 patents · retail loss prevention · neither party is public
- Competitive
IQX Corp. v. Intuit Inc.
1 patent · small asserter against an incumbent
Three more competitive suits landed in the same months: CurioXR v. Meta Platforms on April 2, Snowflake ITM v. Microsoft on April 14, and NumberAI v. Dream Lab AI on June 17. Competitive relationship labels come from model classification in the source data rather than from court findings.
Portfolio attributes across all assertions
- Acquired patents
- All industries: 53.0%
- Median grant → suit
- All industries: 6.7 yrs
- Median priority → suit
- The full arc, filing to assertion
- Continuations
- All industries: 43.4%
- Avg simple family
- All industries 15.4 · median here 6
- Avg independent claims
- 21.6 total claims average
Software assertions are older and more heavily acquired than the cross industry norm, at 60.1% acquired against 53.0% and a full year longer from grant to suit. Average family size sits below the cross industry figure because the NPE mix pulls it down.
Most active asserters in window
Entities that do not practice
- SynchroFi LLC
- Lone Star Document Management, LLC
- VE Opening LLC
- Gamehancement LLC
- Congruent Media Resourcing LLC
- Tesseract Systems LLC
- Artificial Intelligence Industry Association, Inc.
- WebSock Global Strategies LLC
- Speech Transcription LLC
- UBQS-IP LLC
The second entry combines four cases filed as Lone Star Document Management, LLC with two filed as LONE STAR DOCUMENT MANAGEMENT, LLC. UBQS-IP LLC combines cases filed under two spellings of the name.
Operating companies
- Alpha Modus, Corp.
- ConnectionOpen, Inc.
- DISH Technologies L.L.C.
- Golden
- Google LLC
- Intent IQ, LLC
- Quickvault, Inc.
- ZapFraud Inc.
One NPE filed eight suits while the operating company side holds a single asserter at eight, with a flat tie at two beneath it. The two distributions are not comparable, and only the NPE side shows repeat filing at any scale.