Earlier this month, publicly traded Quest Patent Research Corporation (QPRC) purchased more than 2,500 US patents, as well as foreign counterparts and applications, for $9M from Monterey Research, LLC. The subsidiary receiving those assets, MR Licensing LLC, has filed its first suit, in which it accuses DENSO and Renesas Electronics (2:25-cv-00441) of infringing eight of the patents through the provision of a long list of accused products. QPRC’s recent SEC filing describes the portfolio as related to “storage device security and semiconductor circuitry”, indicating that the financing for the deal includes “up to $7,500,000 for patent enforcement costs, including legal fees subject to budget limitation to be agreed upon”. Monterey Research sued the same two defendants over four of the patents appearing in MR Licensing’s new complaint last year; word on the docket of that case concerning this change of ownership has yet to appear, beyond entries of appearance by MR Licensing counsel Fabricant LLP.
QPRC has been picking up portfolios for assertion for well over decade, under funding schemes that have shifted over those years, reaching stark terms in 2021. Before then, QPRC had operated with backing by Intelligent Partners LLC, an Austin, Texas-based company “specialising in investing in and managing technology and intellectual property assets”. Intelligent Partners is controlled by Andrew Fitton (founder of Gracchi Capital Partners in the UK) and Michael Carper (a former executive and general counsel at Nextel), who are also associated with NPEs Mobile Telecommunications Technologies, LLC (d/b/a MTel, LLC) (which sued more than 25 defendants between 2012-2017 over a group of former SkyTel patents) and United Wireless Holdings Inc., with which QPRC had even earlier funding arrangements.
Longtime QPRC CEO Jon S. Scahill has described Intelligent Partners as the “transferee of United Wireless under the 2015 Securities Purchase Agreement”. Fuller coverage of QPRC’s pre-February 2021 financing arrangements, as reflected in earlier SEC filings, is provided at “QPRC Debuts Two New Patents in Latest Suits, Against Mitsubishi, Nintendo, and Xiaomi” (March 2021). In September 2020, by their own terms, certain promissory notes “in the aggregate amount of $4,672,810 were outstanding” and “became due”, as a result of which “Intelligent Partners had the right to declare a default” and, per QPRC, force a bankruptcy. Instead, QPRC stopped all monetization efforts in favor of a restructuring. QPRC secured a rescue from QPRC Finance LLC (QFL, formed in Delaware in December 2016).
For fuller coverage of that rescue, see “QPRC’s Harbor Island Files First Suit” (March 2024). In a recent 8-K, QPRC lays out the contours of the deal with Monterey Research:
On April 11, 2025, Quest Patent Research Corporation (the “Company”) and its newly-formed wholly-owned subsidiary, MR Licensing LLC, a Texas limited liability company (“MR”), entered into a series of agreements, all dated April 11, 2025, with QPRC Corporate Finance Alpha LLC and QPRC Corporate Finance Bravo LLC, both of which are not affiliated with the Company and who are collectively referred to as “QPRC Finance.” The agreements are (i) a prepaid forward purchase agreement (the “Purchase Agreement”), (iii) a security agreement (the “Security Agreement”), (iii) a patent security agreement (the “Patent Security Agreement”), (iv) an intercreditor agreement and subordination agreement (the “Subordination Agreement”) among the Company, MR, other subsidiaries of the Company and Intelligent Partners LLC (“Intelligent Partners”), (v) an irrevocable letter of instructions to Fabricant LLP, the law firm that is to represent MR in the litigation relating to the monetization of the patents to be purchased with the proceeds of the financing from QPRC Finance (the “Law Firm”) as to the disposition of any funds generated from the proceeds of the financing, (the “Letter of Instructions”), (vi) a waterfall agreement among the Company, MR, QPRC Finance and the Law Firm as to allocation of proceeds of such monetization (the “Waterfall Agreement” and, together with the Purchase Agreement, the Security Agreement, the Patent Security Agreement, the Subordination Agreement and the Letter of Instructions, the “Investment Documents”). On April 17, 2025, Intelligent Partners executed the Subordination Agreement, which was a condition to the obligations of QPRC Finance to advance any funding to the Company and MR.
QPRC Corporate Finance Alpha LLC and QPRC Corporate Finance Bravo LLC were both formed in Delaware on March 17, 2025. (Note that QPRC Finance II LLC and QPRC Finance III LLC were created in Delaware in February 2022 and December 2022, respectively, to facilitate the last iteration of QPRC’s funding.) The same SEC filing recounts subsequent actions taken against the above backdrop:
On April 18, 2025, MD [sic] took down $9,000,000 of proceeds from the QPRC Finance financing to purchase the patent portfolio from Monterey, which consisted of more than 2,500 United States patents, foreign patents and patent applications, pursuant to the Monterey Agreement. These patents relate to data storage device security and semiconductor circuitry. The payment was made directly from QPRC Finance to Monterey in accordance with instructions from the Company and MR. The Company also requested $750,000 for operating expenses, which as of the date of this report, has not been granted.
Monterey Research is an IPValue Management (d/b/a IPValue) plaintiff. IPValue has been owned by private equity firm Vector Capital since 2014. Vector Capital, formed in 1997, has billed itself as a “technology-focused private equity firm”, touting current management of “over $4 billion in equity capital from a variety of investors including university endowments, foundations, financial institutions, and wealthy families”. Over the years, entities associated with IPValue have acquired large portfolios to monetize: for example, in rough chronological order, Future Link Systems, LLC, from NXP Semiconductors; Longitude Licensing Limited, from Elpida; Trivale Technologies LLC, from Mitsubishi Electric; and Marlin Semiconductor Limited, from UMC; as well as, more recently, Tahoe Research Limited, from Intel; Lumitek Display Technology Limited, from Seiko Epson; and Red Oak Innovations Limited, from InnoLux.
Monterey Research’s patents were once held by Cypress Semiconductor, which was acquired by Infineon in April 2020. Cypress assigned Monterey Research its extensive portfolio, with assets numbering in the thousands, through a series of transactions concentrated between August 2016 and December 2019. As a formal matter, the recipient launched two litigation campaigns between, one in 2019, which is still active against Renesas and DENSO having hit AMD, Broadcom, Nanya Technology, Qualcomm, and STMicroelectronics before that; and the second in 2021, closed now after also hitting AMD, Broadcom, and Qualcomm, as well as Toshiba.
In April 2024, Monterey Research filed an Eastern District of Texas complaint against Renesas and DENSO, asserting four of the patents appearing in MR Licensing’s new complaint (6,243,300; 7,089,133; 7,679,968; 7,825,688). District Judge Rodney Gilstrap denied, in a February 2025 order, a DENSO motion to sever and stay Monterey’s claims against it, as a customer of the accused Renesas products. A motion to change venue remains pending before the court. Last September, Renesas filed a declaratory judgment action over the same four patents in the Northern District of California; this past December, District Judge Jacqueline Scott Corley granted a motion to stay that case under the first-to-file rule.
Mention of the change of ownership in these four patents—or the wider Monterey Research portfolio—has yet to appear on the docket of the April 2024 Monterey case against Renesas and DENSO before Judge Gilstrap. Russ August & Kabat (RAK) represents Monterey Research there. In fact, last October, the court forced the plaintiff to designate lead counsel, in response to which Brian D. Ledahl of RAK was identified. In February 2025, though, attorneys from Fabricant LLP, the law firm that has long represented QPRC clients, began entering appearances for Monterey Research, first among them Alfred R. Fabricant.
For background coverage of that case, as well as for an entry point into deeper coverage of Monterey’s litigation activities, see “IPValue’s Monterey Research Sues Renesas, Alleged Customer DENSO” (April 2024). In 2020-2021, some patents held by Monterey Research were assigned to a pair of NPEs associated with Texas monetization firm IP Edge LLC, just before its apparent demise. For coverage of that relatively minor divestiture, see “IPValue’s Monterey Research Sues Broadcom Twice as Active IPRs Stay Other Suits” (June 2021).
In the new complaint against Renesas and DENSO, MR Licensing asserts the above four patents together with four others from its newly acquired portfolio (6,825,689; 7,103,381; 7,761,232; 8,027,789). It defines the accused products to include:
. . . (a) all products that contain global mapping systems for coupling an I/O pin to a plurality of functional units of a microcontroller, (b) all products that include transceiver circuits configured to couple analog input/output signals with a multiplexer circuit when in a first state, and to couple digital input/output signals with the multiplexer circuit when in a second state, (c) all products that periodically determine a vehicle location, scan to locate available wireless data network access points, and transmit the vehicle location through the located access point to an endpoint receiver, (d) Renesas products with embedded flash memory macro manufactured using 28nm process; Renesas products with embedded flash memory macro manufactured using 40nm process; Renesas products with embedded flash memory macro manufactured by Renesas using older than 40nm process; all other Renesas products that include flash memory configured to erase memory cells by generating neutralizing holes in a substrate, moving the neutralizing holes to the channel; and substantially neutralizing spillover electrons in the channel with the neutralizing holes, (e) Renesas products with LVD support, and (f) Renesas products that include integrated chips with programmable digital and analog circuit blocks capable of communicating with one another.
The plaintiff identifies some accused products by name: “the Renesas RL78/F13 and F14 MCUs, R5F10PLJL, R5F10PLJLFB M16C/5M and M16C/57 MCU Groups, RX71M, RX Family / RX600 and RX700 Series and RL78/F15 MCUs, V2X Solution; R-Car W2R, R-Car W2H, R-Car H3 Series, , RA6M3 Group, R-Car E2, S7G2, RA4M3, RA6M4, V850E2/Mx4, uPD70F4021, uPD70F4022, uPD70F3410, uPD70F3412, uPD70F3414, uPD70F3415, SH72531, R5F72531KFPU, SH72531D, R5F72531DKFPU, H8SX MCUs, and RH850 Family Microcontrollers”.
Fabricant LLP signed the complaint. A judge has yet to be assigned, although Judge Gilstrap’s courtroom seems the likely destination. 4/25, Eastern District of Texas.
