diff --git a/qdrant-landing/content/blog/case-study-garden-intel.md b/qdrant-landing/content/blog/case-study-garden-intel.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..e5712aebf --- /dev/null +++ b/qdrant-landing/content/blog/case-study-garden-intel.md @@ -0,0 +1,66 @@ +--- +draft: false +title: "How Garden Scaled Patent Intelligence with Qdrant" +short_description: "Garden unlocked patent analysis by migrating to Qdrant’s filterable vector search." +description: "Discover how Garden ingests 200 M+ patents and product documents, achieves sub-100 ms query latency, and launched a new infringement-analysis business line with Qdrant." +preview_image: /blog/case-study-garden/social_preview_case-study-garden.jpg +social_preview_image: /blog/case-study-garden/social_preview_case-study-garden.jpg +date: 2025-05-09T00:00:00Z +author: "Daniel Azoulai" +featured: true + +tags: +- Garden Intel +- vector search +- patent analysis +- intellectual property +- case study +--- + +## Garden Accelerates Patent Intelligence with Qdrant’s Filterable Vector Search + +For more than a century, patent litigation has been a slow, people-powered business. Analysts read page after page—sometimes tens of thousands of pages—hunting for the smoking-gun paragraph that proves infringement or invalidity. Garden, a New York-based startup, set out to change that by applying large-scale AI to the entire global patent corpus—more than 200 million patents—in conjunction with terabytes of real world data. + +*“Our customers need to compare millions of possible patent–product pairings in seconds, not days,” explains co-founder Justin Mack. “That means vector search that can handle huge data sets **and** surgical-grade filtering.”* + +### A data set that breaks naïve vector search + +Each patent can run to 100+ pages and, thanks to decades of revisions, carries roughly 2,000 metadata fields: jurisdiction, grant date, family ID, claim dependencies, and so on. Garden splits every patent into semantically meaningful chunks, producing “many hundreds of millions” of vectors. The same pipeline ingests real-world product data to compare against the patents. + +The engineering demands quickly outgrew Garden’s first solution, a fully-managed vector service. They had tens of gigabytes of data already costing **≈ $5,000 / month**. And a lack of native filterable-HNSW meant that Garden had to stand up a separate index for **every** combination of country, date range, and technology tag. Finally, with no infrastructure visibility, troubleshooting was slow and expensive. + +A second migration to a self-hosted open-source alternative cut costs but introduced new pains: on-call operations for a two-person team, upgrades during business hours, and—crucially—the same filtering limitations. + +### Discovering Qdrant + +When Garden found Qdrant’s blog post on **filterable HNSW**, the team realized they could get the search semantics they wanted without bolting on bespoke sharding logic. + +“Filterable HNSW was the deal-maker, but Qdrant Cloud’s *managed* Rust backbone sealed it,” says Mack. “We kept source-level transparency while off-loading 24×7 ops.” + +* **Scalar quantization (8-bit)** keeps hot vectors in RAM while colder, full-precision embeddings sit on disk—perfect for Garden’s read-heavy, bursty workload. + +* **SLA-backed sub-100 ms latency** meets Garden’s product target even when a user fires off thousands of queries in a single button-click. + +* **Pay-for-what-you-use pricing** lets Garden store **10× more data for roughly the same cost** it once paid for a fraction of the corpus. + +### Migration in practice + +Garden already held all vectors in Google Cloud Storage. A weekend of scripted ETL pushed the embeddings into Qdrant Cloud. Because Qdrant’s ingestion API mirrors popular open-source conventions, the team only altered a few lines of an existing migration script. The heaviest lift—GPU-based embedding of 200 M patents—was finished months earlier on a 2,000-GPU transient cluster. + +### **Business impact** + +| KPI | Before Qdrant | After Qdrant | +| ----- | ----- | ----- | +| Addressable patent corpus | ≈ 20 M | **200 M+** | +| Vector data under management | tens of millions | **hundreds of millions** | +| Typical query latency | 250 – 400 ms | **\< 100 ms p95** | +| Cost per stored GB | baseline | **\~ 10× lower** | +| New revenue lines | 0 | **Full infringement-analysis product** | + +Filterable HNSW didn’t just speed up existing workflows; it unlocked an entirely new line of business—high-confidence infringement detection. Clients now click a button and receive a claim-chart quality analysis in minutes. For some enterprises that translates into seven-plus-figure licensing wins or decisive defense against patent trolls. + +### Looking ahead + +As Garden’s customer base grows, query-per-second (QPS) requirements will rise faster than data volume. Meanwhile, Garden plans deeper enrichment of every patent—breaking long descriptions into structured facts the vector index can exploit. + +“We don’t have to think about the vector layer anymore,” Mack notes. “Qdrant lets us focus on the IP insights our customers pay for.” \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/qdrant-landing/static/blog/case-study-garden/social_preview_case-study-garden.jpg b/qdrant-landing/static/blog/case-study-garden/social_preview_case-study-garden.jpg new file mode 100644 index 000000000..e2e24b4bf Binary files /dev/null and b/qdrant-landing/static/blog/case-study-garden/social_preview_case-study-garden.jpg differ