Definition
Prior Art
Any publicly available evidence that an invention was already known before the filing date of a patent application — including prior patents, academic papers, product documentation, published code, or public demonstrations. The existence of prior art that fully covers an invention will result in patent rejection. SenseIP's AI agent Leo surfaces prior art during the idea validation phase and uses it constructively: showing founders exactly which element of their idea overlaps with existing patents, and prompting them to identify what makes their approach genuinely different or novel. Prior art search is the intelligence layer of the patent process.
From the episode “How Do I Protect My Idea?”Hear it on the podcast1 episode
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Related terms in Finance & Markets
PIPEDACanada's federal private sector privacy law.Prediction MarketA real-money market where participants trade contracts on the outcomes of future events. The price of a contract represents the market's aggregated probability estimate for that outcome occurring. LightningRod used Polymarket - the largest prediction market - as a live benchmark: train a model on public news using the chronological prediction method, have it place real bets, measure profit and calibration against GPT-4, Claude, Gemini, and other frontier models. The small LightningRod model won. Ben Turtle has mixed feelings about prediction markets broadly: they create strong incentives to surface private information into prices, but they also lower the barrier to problem gambling.Present Cash ValueA financial concept describing the current worth of a future sum of money, discounted for time and risk.Prevailing WageA government-compiled benchmark of wages paid by occupation and county, derived from surveys across the country. On qualifying federal and state construction projects, contractors must pay workers at or above the prevailing wage for that occupation and location. Often cited as protective for workers, but frequently lower in practice than what competitive private employers already pay — a fact that exposes how the survey methodology (often drawing from union-reported wages) shapes the baseline.Priority DateThe official filing date of a patent application, which determines which inventor has superior rights when two parties claim the same invention. Under the America Invents Act (2011), the United States switched from a first-to-invent system to a first-to-file system: the first person to file a patent application wins priority, regardless of who actually invented the idea first. This makes the priority date the single most important protective action an inventor can take before disclosing an idea publicly. A provisional patent filing establishes priority date immediately, even before a full application is complete.Procure-to-Pay (P2P)The full procurement workflow from identifying a need and sourcing vendors through to purchase order, invoice receipt, and payment. Levelpath automates this entire workflow in a single platform.Provisional Patent ApplicationA low-cost, informal filing at the USPTO that establishes a priority date without requiring formal claims, patent figures, or legal formatting. Filing fee as low as $65 for micro-entities (individual inventors meeting USPTO criteria). Grants 12 months of patent-pending status during which the inventor can disclose the idea, fundraise, and build without losing patent rights. Must be converted to a full non-provisional application within 12 months to mature into a granted patent. Ophir cites provisionals as the most criminally underused tool in the founder's legal stack: only ~170,000 filed per year in the US versus ~700,000 non-provisional applications, despite the expected ratio being the inverse.Purchase Order (PO)A formal document issued by a buyer to a vendor authorizing a specific purchase at agreed terms. The PO creates a contractual obligation and is used to validate incoming invoices.