Serverless & FaaS Patents: Who Leads, Where the Gaps Are 2026
- Filing peaked in 2019 at 12 records then dropped to a single filing at the 2022 midpoint before climbing again toward 2026 — a pause-then-accelerate pattern rather than steady growth.
- One assignee's FaaS gateway claims dominate citations the most-cited record in this set draws 326 citations, more than six times the next closest filing, signalling where downstream work has clustered.
- The field is still small and concentrated 21 total patent families worldwide, with United States and EPO receiving offices accounting for the bulk of filings and India and PCT routes carrying the rest.
A narrow but consolidating field
Serverless and Function-as-a-Service patenting is a small corpus by cloud-infrastructure standards: 21 patent families span cold start latency, concurrency scaling, sandbox isolation, state management and billing granularity claims filed under G06F, H04L and G06Q classifications. Filing activity is uneven rather than steadily rising — a sharp early peak, a quiet middle year, and renewed filing pressure heading into the most recent years. Publication lags filing by roughly 18 months, so 2025-2026 counts will revise upward as later filings surface.
The IPC mix shows this is fundamentally a data-processing problem dressed in cloud terminology: G06F carries almost every record, H04L appears where network transport and event routing intersect with execution, and G06Q and G06N show up only at the margins — billing logic and AI-assisted scheduling are still thin.
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Filing trend and technology composition
Two views of the same 21-family dataset: how filing activity has moved year over year, and which IPC subclasses carry the claim weight.
Filing trend
Filings rose to 12 in 2019, fell back to a single filing by the 2022 midpoint, and have been climbing again toward 2026 (partial year), consistent with a technology that had an early speculative wave and is now attracting a second, more deliberate one.
IPC composition
G06F (electric digital data processing) covers 20 of the 21 records, confirming this is core compute-and-scheduling territory; H04L appears in 9 records where event-driven transport matters; G06Q (5) and G06N (2) mark the still-thin edges around billing and AI-assisted orchestration.
Shares are the percentage of the 21 records in scope. A patent can carry several IPC classes, so the shares add up to more than 100%.
Go deeper on Serverless and Function-as-a-Service Platforms with Eureka
This page is one run against one query. Ask Eureka your own question about serverless and function-as-a-service platforms and every answer comes back with the patent numbers behind it.
Try EurekaThe most-cited filings
Function as a service gateway (US11310335B2)
Embodiments disclosed herein provide for systems and methods of efficiently scheduling the execution of user-provided functions on available serverless computing vendor platforms using a Function as a Service ("FaaS") gateway, wherein the FaaS gateway provides the function code to one of the available serverless computing vendor platforms based on service parameters provided by each platform.Filed by JPMorgan Chase Bank, granted 2022-04-19 — notable as a financial-services assignee patenting cross-vendor FaaS orchestration rather than a cloud infrastructure vendor.
| # | Publication no. | Patent title | Citations |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | US20210263779A1 | Function as a service (FAAS) system enhancements | 326 |
| 2 | WO2020096639A1 | Function as a service (FAAS) system enhancements | 62 |
| 3 | US11922220B2 | Function as a service (FaaS) system enhancements | 52 |
| 4 | US20190349447A1 | Function as a service gateway | 47 |
| 5 | US11614982B1 | Autonomous concurrency for serverless functions | 5 |
| 6 | WO2019217889A1 | Function as a service gateway | 2 |
| 7 | US11310335B2 | Function as a service gateway | 1 |
Citation counts favour older filings inside any searched corpus; treat this table as a map of influence to date, not of current technical leadership.
Publication numbers are shown where the record carries one (7 of 7 rows); clicking a row searches Eureka by that number.
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Browse MCP servers →What the numbers mean for a filing decision
Three patterns worth acting on before drafting claims in this space.
Gateway and scheduling claims already draw heavy downstream traffic
The lead record, a FaaS system enhancement filing, carries 326 citations — over six times the second-ranked record at 62. Related family members (WO2020096639A1, US11922220B2) repeat the same core scheduling concept across jurisdictions, meaning the underlying idea is well fenced even if worded differently in each filing.
An early wave cooled before a second one started building
Filing peaked at 12 records in 2019, then fell to a single filing by 2022, before climbing back toward 3 in the partial 2026 year. That is not a maturing field settling down — it reads more like an initial speculative rush followed by a quieter consolidation period, with new entrants now re-engaging.
Billing and AI-assisted orchestration are barely claimed
G06Q (business/billing logic) appears in only 5 records and G06N (AI-based computing) in just 2, against 20 in G06F. Billing granularity and AI-driven concurrency prediction are named in the search criteria but thinly represented in the actual claim set — these are the areas with room to file distinct claims.
Eureka can read the same corpus for gaps instead of for coverage: under-claimed branches adjacent to serverless and function-as-a-service platforms, with the prior art for and against each one.
| Assignee | Co-assignee | Shared families |
|---|---|---|
| University of Chicago | University of North Texas | 2 |
| SIVARANJANI S | DR R ANANDHI | 1 |
| S PACHAIYAMMAL | M AADHITHYAN | 1 |
| S PACHAIYAMMAL | K M P BRUNDHA | 1 |
| S PACHAIYAMMAL | K BHUVANA | 1 |
| S PACHAIYAMMAL | K BAKYA | 1 |
| S PACHAIYAMMAL | GUNMAY PAUL | 1 |
| S PACHAIYAMMAL | C ABITHA | 1 |
Only 10 co-assignee pairs exist across the dataset, and the strongest is an academic pairing (University of Chicago and University of North Texas, appearing together twice) rather than a corporate joint filing — commercial co-development in this space is not yet showing up in the patent record.
Who is filing, and who just started
The assignee base is a mix of one financial-services incumbent with an early, heavily-cited gateway family, a handful of individual academic filers active in the most recent year, and named technology companies that have gone quiet.
New individual filers are the only ones active right now
Recent-year momentum shows single filings from academic-style individual assignees (SIVARANJANI S, S PACHAIYAMMAL, MS S M SOWMIYA, MS P MOHANA PRIYA) rather than continued output from the largest historical filers.
Named technology incumbents show zero recent-year filings
Both JPMorgan Chase Bank and Intel show zero filings in the latest year despite earlier activity — either their serverless patenting has moved to unpublished pending applications, or claim strategy has shifted elsewhere for now.
US and EPO dominate, India is a growing secondary route
Receiving offices split 8 United States, 4 EPO, 3 India, 3 WIPO/PCT, 2 Singapore and 1 Hong Kong — a filing footprint concentrated in traditional cloud jurisdictions with India emerging as a distinct third venue.
| Assignee | Recent year | YoY |
|---|---|---|
| SIVARANJANI S | 1 | — |
| S PACHAIYAMMAL | 1 | — |
| MS S M SOWMIYA | 1 | — |
| MS P MOHANA PRIYA | 1 | — |
| JPMorgan Chase Bank, N.A. | 0 | — |
| Intel Corporation | 0 | — |
| University of Chicago | 0 | -100% |
| University of North Texas | 0 | -100% |
Where to take this analysis
This landscape identifies concentration and gaps; turning that into a filing or freedom-to-operate position takes closer claim work.
Map claims against the gateway family
Before drafting anything touching cross-vendor scheduling or FaaS gateways, run a claim chart against the US20210263779A1 / WO2020096639A1 / US11922220B2 family — its citation weight suggests broad downstream reliance.
Explore claim charts in EurekaTrack the individual-filer cluster
The most recent filing activity comes from individual academic assignees rather than incumbents. Set up monitoring on these names to catch follow-on families early, before they consolidate into a larger assignee.
Set up assignee alerts in EurekaDraft in the thin IPC branches
Billing granularity and AI-assisted concurrency prediction sit well below their share of the search scope in actual filings. A first claim drafted precisely in these branches faces less prior art density.
Run a white space search in EurekaCommon questions about serverless and FaaS patents
This landscape tracks 21 patent families published between 2015 and mid-2026 that combine serverless or FaaS terminology with claims on cold start latency, state management, billing granularity, concurrency scaling or sandbox isolation. That is a small, tightly scoped corpus rather than a comprehensive count of every cloud-computing patent — broader searches without the technical-detail filters would return a much larger set. Filing peaked in 2019 at 12 records and has been rebuilding since a 2022 low point of one filing.
By citation count, a single family stands out: a "Function as a Service (FAAS) system enhancements" filing published as US20210263779A1 carries 326 citations, with related family members WO2020096639A1 and US11922220B2 repeating the concept across jurisdictions. JPMorgan Chase Bank's US11310335B2 FaaS gateway filing is another notable entry, applying cross-vendor scheduling logic from a financial-services rather than cloud-vendor perspective. Citation leadership skews toward older filings, so newer entrants may hold claims that matter more going forward but have not yet accumulated citations.
US11310335B2, assigned to JPMorgan Chase Bank and granted in April 2022, claims a Function as a Service gateway that schedules execution of user-provided functions across multiple available serverless vendor platforms, selecting a platform based on each vendor's service parameters. It is a cross-vendor orchestration and scheduling patent rather than a claim on the underlying serverless execution model itself. Anyone building multi-cloud FaaS routing or vendor-arbitrage scheduling logic should review its specific claim language before assuming clear freedom to operate.
Billing granularity and AI-assisted concurrency scaling are named in the technical scope of this field but are thinly represented in the actual filings — only 5 of 21 records touch G06Q business-logic classification and just 2 touch G06N AI-computing classification, against 20 in the core G06F compute bucket. Cross-vendor sandbox isolation handoff and cold-start pre-warming heuristics are similarly under-claimed relative to how often they appear in technical discussion of the field. These branches carry lower prior-art density and are reasonable candidates for a first, narrowly drafted claim.
The trend is uneven rather than a simple growth curve: filings rose to a peak of 12 in 2019, fell to a single filing by the 2022 midpoint, and have been climbing again toward 3 filings in the partial 2026 year. That shape looks like an early speculative filing wave that cooled, followed by a second, more deliberate wave now building. Because publication lags filing by roughly 18 months, the true 2025-2026 filing count is understated in current data and will likely revise upward.
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Disclaimer. This page is generated from Patsnap Eureka data drawn from a limited snapshot of global patent and scientific-literature records, and is provided for general information and reference only.
Patent data carries inherent limitations: recent filings (typically the most recent 18–24 months) are under-counted due to standard publication lag; counts may be reported at either a patent-family or a patent-record basis and are not always directly comparable; classification, applicant-name, and citation data may contain errors, duplicates, or omissions; and the underlying search query defines and constrains the scope shown. As a result, the analysis may be incomplete or inaccurate and may not reflect the full technology landscape.
Nothing on this page constitutes an exhaustive prior-art, novelty, freedom-to-operate, or validity search, nor does it constitute legal, financial, investment, or professional advice, and it should not be relied upon as such. Any patent, commercial, or strategic decision should be verified independently and reviewed with qualified patent, legal, and domain professionals. Patsnap makes no warranties, express or implied, as to the accuracy, completeness, or fitness for any particular purpose of the information presented.
Machine translation. Assignee and organisation names originally recorded in Chinese, Japanese or Korean have been rendered into English by an AI translation step so that the tables stay readable. These renderings are best-effort and may not match a company’s registered English name; the original name is what the underlying patent record carries, and it is what any Eureka query launched from this page uses.