Aperture Labs is where the methodology is developed, validated, and protected. A decade of work on capability-driven analysis (four issued US patents, an NSF research award, and collaborations with leading universities) underpins everything VertEx does.
The core methods behind capability-driven analysis (automatically identifying, scoring, and surfacing unmet technical needs) are protected by issued US patents, granted to Artemis Intelligence LLC.
Three of the four (US 11,379,538 · 11,392,651 · 11,995,133) form a single patent family covering the detection method, with continuations broadening its scope over time; US 11,762,916 covers the interface and capability-inference layer.
Backed by a multi-year award from the National Science Foundation's APTO program, Aperture Labs is building a new way to forecast where technology is headed: by reading the problems a field is wrestling with, not just the patents and papers it produces. It is a bet that problems are the earliest, most predictive signal of what comes next, and the science of reading them at scale is what the NSF is funding.
Most technology forecasting stops near the top. The deeper, harder-to-reach problem layer is where the leading signal lives, and it requires reading full documents, not just titles and abstracts.
We scan millions of patents, papers, and publications and pull out hundreds of thousands of discrete problems, technologies, solutions, and tradeoffs, all extracted and normalized into a single structured dataset.
Each problem is placed at its level in the technology-to-market stack, from fundamental science and component integration to system design, manufacturing scale-up, adoption, safety, and regulation, and linked to its causes, its proposed solution technologies, and the companies and labs pursuing them.
We are inventing metrics that read the shape of a field: whether a problem is actually getting solved, whether a technology is attacking the critical bottleneck or just optimizing broadly, and how concentrated or diverse a domain is. Together these signals point to which technologies will win, and where companies, labs, and governments should focus money and attention to accelerate progress.
A snapshot of just one of three technical domains mapped so far. The same pipeline runs on any technology area in a matter of weeks.
The same NSF program drove a second line of work: pulling quantitative, verifiable, historical data out of messy, unstructured sources. From decades of patents, journals, filings, and news, it extracts hard performance figures, reconciles wildly inconsistent units and conventions, traces every value back to the document it came from, and reconstructs how a technology's real capabilities have advanced over time.
Whether you're a technology-driven company exploring where your capabilities can win next, an investor trying to understand our trajectory, or a research partner interested in working with Aperture Labs, we'd like to hear from you.