Intellectual Ventures is an American private equity company that centers on the development and licensing of intellectual property. Intellectual Ventures is one of the top-five owners of U.S. patents, as of 2011. Its business model focuses on buying patents and aggregating those patents into a large patent portfolio and licensing these patents to third parties. The company has been described as the country's largest and most notorious patent trolling company, the ultimate patent troll, and the most hated company in tech. In 2009, the firm launched a prototyping and research laboratory, Intellectual Ventures Lab, which attracted media controversy when the book SuperFreakonomics described its ideas for reducing global climate change. The firm also collaborates on humanitarian projects through its Global Good program. Overview In 2000, Intellectual Ventures was founded as a private partnership by Nathan Myhrvold and Edward Jung of Microsoft, later joined by co-founders Peter Detkin of Intel, and Gregory Gorder of Perkins Coie. The Intellectual Ventures Management Company is owned 40% Nathan Myhrvold, 20% Peter Detkin, 20% Gregory Gorder and 20% Edward Jung. They reportedly have raised over $5.5 billion from many large companies including Microsoft, Intel, Sony, Nokia, Apple, Google, Yahoo, American Express, Adobe, SAP, Nvidia, and eBay, plus investment firms such as Stanford, Hewlett Foundation, Mayo Clinic, and Charles River Ventures. In December 2013, the firm released a list of approximately 33,000 of the nearly 40,000 assets in their monetization program. Licenses to patents are obtained through investment and royalties. In March 2009, the firm announced expansion into China, India, Japan, Korea and Singapore to build partnerships with scientists and institutions in Asia. Investment funds The company operates three primary investment funds: Invention Investment Fund (IIF), purchasing existing inventions and licensing them Invention Development Fund (IDF), partnering chiefly with research institutions to file descriptions of new inventions Investment Science Fund (ISF), focused on internally developed inventions Intellectual Ventures Lab In 2009, Intellectual Ventures launched a prototyping and research laboratory, Intellectual Ventures Lab, hiring scientists to imagine inventions which could exist but do not yet exist, and then filing descriptions of these inventions with the US Patent Office. Notable participants include Robert Langer of MIT, Leroy Hood of the Institute for Systems Biology, Ed Harlow of Harvard Medical School, Bran Ferren and Danny Hillis of Applied Minds, and Sir John Pendry of Imperial College. The Sunday Times reported that the company applies for about 450 patents per