2019 Year-end Update from John Amster, CEO

It’s been a busy year for Rowan. We are building a great team that has executed well on all fronts. We made several major releases of our patent platform, helping us more than triple the number of users and grow the number of patents, now thousands, being processed on our platform every month. On the transactions and consulting side, we will shortly surpass $100M in transactions facilitated and have advised big and small companies on a wide variety of IP strategy issues.

We have also launched a business that we hope will be a game changer for companies facing online counterfeiting. We purchased and integrated our technology infrastructure for identifying counterfeit activity and we secured our first client, Cisco.

We are pleased to announce what we hope will be the first of many victories in helping companies stop online counterfeiting that not only impacts revenue, but can pose risks to national security, public health, and safety. We see many of the same dynamics we saw in the NPE patent space, but the stakes are much higher. Counterfeiters have scaled their operations and are attacking multiple brands at the same time. Rowan, with the help of Cisco and others, is building a scalable solution that can cost-effectively enable the thousands of companies impacted to fight back.

Individual companies don’t have a counterfeit problem, industries do.

There is no question that a company organizing a multi industry-wide effort can change the economics of counterfeiting. We can increase the volume and severity of enforcement. We can make it easier for domain services, marketplaces, and payment platforms to triage and clean counterfeiters from their platforms. Most importantly, we will make it far more cost effective for brand owners by building scale into all aspects of the enforcement process.

We thank Cisco for its vision and leadership in trying a new approach and helping build awareness for the Rowan effort.