Paperless Parts Awarded Fifth Patent, Advancing Its Position as the Leading Intelligence Platform for the Industrial Supply Chain

New patent protects core capabilities of the company's Manufacturing Intelligence Engine, the proprietary AI built exclusively on manufacturing data and secured within a FedRAMP Moderate Equivalent and CMMC-Compliant boundary.

April 9, 2026

Paperless Parts, the leading intelligence platform for the industrial supply chain, today announced that it has been awarded its fifth U.S. patent (US12524607B2). The patent covers core capabilities of the company’s Manufacturing Intelligence Engine, the proprietary AI that reads a manufacturing drawing the moment it is uploaded and automatically translates it into structured, actionable intelligence for quoting and sourcing.

While much of the AI industry is racing to build large, general-purpose models, Paperless Parts has taken a fundamentally different approach by building a cost-efficient AI model that excels at understanding manufacturing-specific data. This award further distinguishes the company from generic AI providers and point solutions that lack a deep manufacturing context.

Paperless Parts’ patented system is designed to understand the technical language of the shop floor, including geometric dimensioning and tolerancing (GD&T), material and surface finish callouts, thread specifications, and dozens of other conventions embedded in engineering drawings that general-purpose AI simply is not built to handle.

“This latest patent protects our investment in creating technology to automatically go from manufacturing blueprints to an actual manufacturing plan; think materials, routers, and finishes,” shares Scott Sawyer, Paperless Parts Co-Founder and Chief Scientist at Paperless Parts.
“AI is powerful, but in order to be useful to our customers, the models need to understand the very specific language that original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) use to communicate design intent,” adds Jason Luce, Paperless Parts’ Chief Technology Officer. “We are not applying a general-purpose model to a specialized problem. Instead, we have built our model specifically for this problem.”

The patent spans several interconnected capabilities that together form the foundation of the Paperless Parts experience:

Intelligent Drawing Comprehension
The system uses machine learning to extract manufacturing requirements such as tolerances, finishes, thread callouts, and other GD&T symbols directly from uploaded PDF engineering drawings, eliminating the need for a human to manually parse a print before quoting or sourcing can begin.

Geometry-Aware Extraction
The system correlates what it reads from annotations with the underlying 3D geometry of the part, so it understands not just what a specification says, but what feature it applies to. This is what separates a true manufacturing AI from a generic document reader.

Resilience to Real-World Files
In practice, customer-uploaded files are often imperfect: rotated, degraded, or non-standard. The system automatically assesses and self-corrects for these conditions, ensuring consistent performance at scale.

For manufacturers operating in defense, aerospace, and other regulated industries, data security is a prerequisite. Paperless Parts’ AI model operates entirely within its FedRAMP Moderate Equivalent and CMMC boundary, meaning that sensitive technical drawings, proprietary part data, and customer information never leave a controlled, compliant environment. This stands in stark contrast to many general-purpose AI tools, where data handling, residency, and model training practices remain opaque or incompatible with the compliance requirements of defense supply chain participants.

This new patent is the second granted within Paperless Parts’ “AI Text Extraction” patent family and a continuation of the company’s earlier foundational patent (US11593563B2, granted February 2023). Together, they form a layered IP portfolio protecting the core intelligence of the Paperless Parts platform. The company’s five granted patents reflect a sustained, methodical investment in proprietary technology that is difficult to replicate and increasingly relevant as manufacturers look to AI to solve longstanding operational challenges.

For more information about Paperless Parts’ approach to AI or to address any Frequently Asked Questions, please visit https://www.paperlessparts.com/artificial-intelligence-in-paperless-parts/.

About Paperless Parts

Paperless Parts is the leading intelligence platform for the industrial supply chain. The platform uses AI to transform complex technical files into actionable intelligence, enabling manufacturers to quote faster and more accurately, and sourcing teams to procure with greater precision and confidence. Trusted by hundreds of manufacturers and built on a FedRAMP Moderate Equivalent, CMMC-compliant foundation, Paperless Parts is purpose-built for the security and complexity demands of advanced manufacturing. To learn more, visit paperlessparts.com for quoting and estimating, or radar.paperlessparts.com for sourcing intelligence.

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Alison MacDonald
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