Why We Built GleanMark — From Frustration to Freedom

Over six years ago, I named my company Glean.

It was the perfect name. Short, memorable, meaningful. We built Glean to help finance teams see what they were missing in their spend — gleaning insights from data that was hiding in plain sight. For a company founded by someone who had spent 11 years as a CFO protecting businesses from financial blind spots, the name felt right.

Then we found ourselves in a trademark dispute over the name.

The Experience That Changed Everything

Going through a trademark conflict as a founder gave me an up-close look at the tools available for brand protection — and I was stunned by how poor they were.

The USPTO website is built for compliance, not insight. There was no easy way to set up alerts, track filings, or research the competitive landscape around a brand name. The search interface felt like it was designed in 2005. Multiple disconnected systems for status checks, searches, and proceedings — none of which talked to each other. Answering a straightforward question could consume an entire afternoon.

The legacy monitoring tools I found were expensive and clearly built for large law firms with five-figure software budgets — not founders, brand managers, or small teams. The free tools were disorganized and required hours of manual effort to get basic answers. There was no middle ground: either you paid enterprise prices or you did everything by hand.

That experience gave me a deep education in trademark prosecution, likelihood of confusion, the spectrum of distinctiveness, TTAB proceedings, and the dozens of procedural steps that make up the trademark system. It also consumed time, money, and focus that should have gone into building our product.

That frustration planted a seed.

From CFO to Founder — Twice

My career before Glean was spent in the CFO seat. For 11 years, I built my professional life around one idea: protecting companies from blind spots. Financial blind spots, operational blind spots, the kind of risks that do not show up until they have already cost you.

Glean was the first company I founded based on that instinct — giving finance teams visibility into spending they were missing. We built the product, grew the team, and earned the trust of customers who valued clarity over complexity. Different industry, same thesis: the professionals doing critical work deserve tools that respect them.

When Glean was acquired by Pipe, I finally had time to pull on the thread that had been stuck in my head since the trademark conflict. The question was simple: why are the tools for protecting a brand so much worse than the tools for protecting a balance sheet?

I did not have a good answer. So I started building one.

Listening to the People Who Do the Work

Before writing a single line of code, I talked to the people who live in the trademark world every day: attorneys and paralegals at small and mid-size firms.

What they told me confirmed everything I had experienced as a founder — and then some.

They spend hours on manual searches that should take minutes. They work with monitoring software that feels like it was built for a different era. They get buried in alert noise that does not help them prioritize what matters. They manage client portfolios across spreadsheets, emails, and disconnected systems because no single platform brings it all together.

These are skilled professionals doing critical work for their clients — advising on brand clearance, responding to office actions, managing maintenance deadlines, and policing infringement. The tools they have do not respect the quality of their work or the value of their time.

One attorney told me that her firm had stopped offering monitoring as a service to smaller clients because the cost of the tools made it unprofitable below a certain portfolio size. Her clients were not getting worse legal advice — they were simply getting less of it, because the economics of the existing tools priced them out.

That was the moment the seed became a company.

The Gap in the Market

The trademark world has a massive gap. On one side, enterprise platforms from the legacy providers serve the largest law firms and corporations. They have powerful data, but the interfaces are dated and the pricing assumes a Fortune 500 budget.

On the other side, founders and small firms are left with the bare USPTO interface or basic tools that barely scratch the surface. Many founders do not think about trademarks until it is too late — until they get a cease and desist letter, or worse, discover their perfect brand name is already taken after they have built the website, printed the business cards, and told all their customers.

There was very little in between. Few modern platforms combined serious capability with accessible pricing. No tool that treated a solo practitioner's time as just as valuable as a BigLaw partner's. The result was predictable: many small businesses and small firms simply went without proactive trademark protection, and the conflicts that could have been prevented turned into expensive disputes.

That gap is where GleanMark lives.

What We Built

GleanMark is a modern trademark search and monitoring platform built on the full USPTO dataset — 14 million trademark records, indexed and searchable with phonetic, visual, and goods/services similarity matching.

The platform does what the legacy tools do, but in a way that respects how professionals actually work:

• Search across the complete USPTO database with an interface designed for speed and clarity. Phonetic matching catches the similar-sounding marks that text searches miss. Goods and services filtering narrows results to what actually matters for your analysis.
• Monitoring and alerts that tell you when new filings or status changes affect your marks or your clients' portfolios, usually within a day or two. No more logging into TSDR to manually check each serial number.
• Portfolio management that centralizes trademarks, deadlines, and notes in one place — no more spreadsheet gymnastics or digging through email threads to find the latest status update.
• Similarity analysis that surfaces potential conflicts using examiner-style phonetic and visual comparisons, so you can catch problems early — when a simple conversation resolves the issue, not months later when opposition proceedings are the only option.

We did not build this platform to replace attorneys. We built it to eliminate the grunt work so attorneys can focus on the strategic thinking their clients actually pay for. And we built it for founders, brand managers, and marketing teams who need to understand their trademark landscape without needing a law degree or a five-figure software contract.

Access Should Not Require a Five-Figure Contract

Most importantly, we believe that access to quality trademark tools should not be gated by enterprise pricing.

The USPTO data is public. The information belongs to everyone. What has been missing is a modern, well-designed platform to make that data useful — the same way modern fintech tools made financial data accessible to businesses that could not afford Bloomberg terminals.

That is why GleanMark's search is free. That is why our basic monitoring is accessible from day one. The world of trademarks can be intimidating — the legal terminology, the classification system, the examination process. The platform makes it understandable, actionable, and fast.

Better tools should cost less, not more. That is the principle we come back to every time we make a product decision.

What Comes Next

We are still early. GleanMark opened to customers in April 2026, and we are building and improving every week based on feedback from the attorneys, paralegals, and founders who use the platform.

If you work in trademark law, or you are a founder who cares about protecting your brand, I would genuinely love to hear from you. What works. What does not. What you wish existed. What would save you the most time in your daily workflow.

The best products are built by listening to the people who use them every day. That is how we started, and it is how we plan to keep going.

Your brand is more than a serial number in a government database. It is your reputation, your promise to customers, and often the most valuable asset your business owns. Whether you are a solo founder choosing your first company name, a brand manager overseeing a growing portfolio, or a trademark attorney managing hundreds of client matters, you deserve tools that make brand protection faster, clearer, and more affordable. We built this company so you can protect what you have built without wasting your most precious resource — time.

— Howard Katzenberg, Founder & CEO

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