The top patent earner in California last year

Tech and engineering firms were the most inventive patent winners across the U.S. last year—a year marked by growing tension with foreign nations racing to bring world-changing tech like artificial intelligence and space satellites to market.

Nearly 160,000 patents were assigned across the U.S. in 2022, according to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. When a patent is awarded through the USPTO, the individual or company that it's given to has the license to a temporary monopoly on business for that specific product or service. Companies have used patent law for decades to defend their intellectual property—including designs and devices against competitors that might attempt to profit off of stolen ideas.

ClickUp used data from the Patent and Trademark Office to find the top patent earner in California based on the number of patents assigned in USPTO's fiscal year 2022, which ran from Oct. 1, 2021, through Sept. 30, 2022. This analysis was part of a broader national report on the top patent earner in every state. The data looks at the assignees for both regular utility and design patents and was limited to assignees that received at least 10 patents within the year.

Qualcomm Technologies Inc. was the top patent-earner in California last year. It was issued 2,267 patents from the USPTO within the state, comprising 10.1% of all patents considered for the statewide analysis. Qualcomm earned patents in 2022 for technology that could recognize activities taking place in videos, and for annotating images of hands to better train machine learning algorithms. Early artificial intelligence models are notoriously inept at visualizing hands.

Nationally, the vast majority of top patent earners last year were private organizations. Private spending on research and development by U.S. companies has skyrocketed since the economic downturn of the late 2000s. In 2020, it was estimated to total $531 billion, according to the latest available data from the National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics. But nine colleges and universities rose to the top in their respective states for patent filing, as well.

Read on to see who else scooped up the rights to the most cutting-edge tech in California last year.

#50. GlobalFoundries
- Patents issued: 85

#49. Block, Inc.
- Patents issued: 88

#48. Illumina, Inc.
- Patents issued: 89

#47. Medtronic, Inc.
- Patents issued: 91

#46. HRL Laboratories, LLC
- Patents issued: 92

#43. Skyworks Solutions, Inc. (tie)
- Patents issued: 96

#43. Roku, Inc. (tie)
- Patents issued: 96

#43. Edwards Lifesciences Corp. (tie)
- Patents issued: 96

#42. Pure Storage, Inc.
- Patents issued: 98

#41. Lumileds LLC
- Patents issued: 114

#40. Palantir Technologies, Inc.
- Patents issued: 115

#39. SONOS, Inc.
- Patents issued: 120

#37. KLA Corp. (tie)
- Patents issued: 123

#37. California Institute of Technology (tie)
- Patents issued: 123

#36. Baidu USA LLC
- Patents issued: 125

#35. Intuit, Inc.
- Patents issued: 127

#33. Xilinx, Inc. (tie)
- Patents issued: 129

#33. Seagate Technology LLC (tie)
- Patents issued: 129

#32. Servicenow, Inc.
- Patents issued: 130

#31. Zoox, Inc.
- Patents issued: 133

#30. GoPro, Inc.
- Patents issued: 135

#29. Dolby Laboratories Licensing Corp.
- Patents issued: 137

#28. The Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
- Patents issued: 141

#27. Advanced Micro Devices, Inc.
- Patents issued: 144

#26. E-Bay, Inc.
- Patents issued: 149

#25. Waymo LLC
- Patents issued: 151

#24. Tencent America LLC
- Patents issued: 154

#23. Nvidia Corp.
- Patents issued: 155

#22. Intuitive Surgical Operations, Inc.
- Patents issued: 158

#20. Rovi Guides, Inc. (tie)
- Patents issued: 179

#20. Juniper Networks, Inc. (tie)
- Patents issued: 179

#19. Paypal, Inc.
- Patents issued: 184

#18. Splunk, Inc.
- Patents issued: 203

#17. Visa International Service Association
- Patents issued: 216

#16. Adobe, Inc.
- Patents issued: 218

#15. Panasonic Intellectual Property Corp. of America
- Patents issued: 227

#13. Western Digital Technologies, Inc. (tie)
- Patents issued: 288

#13. Wells Fargo Bank, N.A. (tie)
- Patents issued: 288

#12. Salesforce
- Patents issued: 359

#11. Snap, Inc.
- Patents issued: 369

#10. Oracle International Corp.
- Patents issued: 411

#9. Cisco Technology, Inc.
- Patents issued: 443

#8. Vmware, Inc.
- Patents issued: 471

#7. The Regents of the University of California
- Patents issued: 479

#6. Applied Materials, Inc.
- Patents issued: 565

#5. Meta Platforms, Inc.
- Patents issued: 964

#4. Google
- Patents issued: 1,274

#3. Apple, Inc.
- Patents issued: 1,613

#2. Intel Corp.
- Patents issued: 1,673

#1. QUALCOMM Technologies, Inc.
- Patents issued: 2,267