General Patent Corporation (GPC) is the exclusive licensing agent for IpVenture (d/b/a Delivery Solutions), the owner of a portfolio of 18 issued patents relating to many aspects of e-commerce including online ordering and delivery of goods, warehouse management and load balancing for server farms.

The original assignee of the portfolio was Webvan, an online grocer founded in 1999 by Louis Borders (co-founder the Borders bookstore). Webvan's investors included Goldman Sachs and Yahoo!, who encouraged it to rapidly build its own infrastructure to deliver groceries in a number of cities. Within 18 months of its founding, Webvan had spent $1 billion on a string of $30m futuristic warehouses, rapidly expanded into multiple US cities and raised almost half a billion dollars by going public. By 2001, in one of the most epic failures of the dotcom bubble, Webvan announced its bankruptcy.

Though Webvan was unsuccessful, the technology it developed was groundbreaking and helped further the ability of online retailers to market food and other goods over the Internet. Shortly after the Webvan bankruptcy in October, 2001, Kaiser Foundation Hospitals (KFH) acquired the Webvan technology platforms, trademarks, patents, copyrights as well as the URLs for $2.65 million. In April, 2004, exclusive rights to the portfolio (which at that time consisted of a single patent and several pending applications) were acquired by IpVenture, a company that creates, purchases and licenses technologies and patent portfolios in high growth markets.

Prosecution of the pending applications was the responsibility of IpVenture co-founder Dr. Peter Tong. Dr. Tong, an inventor with dozens of patents, has a JD/MBA from Santa Clara University and a PhD in electrical engineering from Caltech. Through the careful diligence of Dr. Tong and his team, the portfolio has blossomed into 13 issued patents with 390 claims, and 15 continuing applications pending.

GPC has retained the law firm of Kirkland & Ellis LLP to enforce the patents.