Ramiz Boulos spent 11 years at The University of Western Australia hunting for the next generation of antibiotics.
From a scientist’s perspective, his journey through the often-sterile, high-stakes world of pharmaceutical research followed a familiar path: PhD, postdoc, lots of research and, eventually, some commercialisation experience.
Along the way, Dr Boulos noticed a systemic rot in the heart of global innovation. Not a lack of ideas but a lack of commercialisation and exits.
Statistically, the patent system is a graveyard. Estimates suggest that less than 10 per cent (and by some accounts, as little as 2 per cent) of all patents ever make it to market as new products.
For Dr Boulos, who arrived in Australia as a humanitarian refugee from Sudan in 1999, this inefficiency felt like a personal affront to the concept of opportunity.
“I saw a huge gap between discovery and the market,” Dr Boulos told Business News.
“Australia’s research institutions generate world-class intellectual property, but they have limited transaction capability. We have the ‘ore’ but we lack the ‘refinery’.”
His solution is IPXchange, a Perth-born startup launched in late 2025 that aims to become the marketplace for IP transactions, first in Australia and then across the Asia-Pacific.
Dr Boulos is not the first person to try and build a marketplace for patents.
The history of the sector is littered with high-profile failures. In a recent white paper, Why IP Marketplaces Fail, Dr Boulos deconstructed 20 years of failed attempts: from the listing boards of the early 2000s to the ambitious financial exchange model of IPXI, which shuttered in 2015 despite backing from giants such as Sony and Ford.
The reason they failed, Dr Boulos argues, is what he calls the ‘valuation vacuum’.
Most platforms tried to treat patents like commodities, oil or gold, that could be traded with a click. But IP is heterogeneous; every patent is a snowflake. Unique. The marketplaces themselves gave little value to those who used them.
“You can’t just list a patent on a website and wait for a cheque,” Dr Boulos said.
“A market needs to build trust, with verified data, and act as a bridge between the scientist’s lab notes and its real market value.”
IPXchange is more than a bulletin board; it has a complete transaction interface.
It targets the structural frictions Dr Boulos identified in another study of Australian university patent activity, which showed high lapse rates (patents being abandoned) often signalled a failure to find a commercial partner early enough in the piece.
Currently, IPXchange is focused on the university and technology transfer office sector. In a state dominated by the capital-intensive mining and energy sectors, Dr Boulos is pitching a different kind of resources play.
Over the next 12 months, he is looking to establish anchor professional partnerships and complete the first end-to-end transactions on the platform. The goal is to prove that IP doesn’t have to die in a filing cabinet.
If Dr Boulos succeeds, IPXchange won’t just be another Perth startup; it will be the missing link in the innovation economy. Ultimately, we may learn how to move the mountains of untapped IP sitting in our universities and elsewhere.
Footnote
Dr Boulos’s journey from a 16-year-old refugee to a PhD-holding founder is the kind of humanitarian-to-high-tech story the WA innovation ecosystem should celebrate.
His background – a blend of science, IP law and a graduate of the Australian Institute of Company Directors – gives him a rare ability to speak both researcher and boardroom.
His advice to other local founders is characteristically pragmatic.
“Solve a problem that professionals in your industry already know exists and hate living with,” he said.
“The best validation isn’t a survey, it’s watching an experienced practitioner recognise your solution immediately because they’ve been working around the absence of it for years.”
Time will tell if IPXchange manages to win ultimate market validation.
• Charlie Gunningham has spent 25 years in WA’s startup sector, is on the WA government’s Innovation Advisory Board, and is chair of Startup WA
