Defendant
2 cases as defendant.
AVM GmbH (now FRITZ! GmbH) — German consumer networking company founded in 1986 in Berlin by four students (Johannes Nill, Peter Faxel, Ulrich Müller-Albring, Jörg-Detlef Gebert). Headquarters: Berlin-Moabit, Germany. It is privately held: since July 2024 a majority stake is owned by Imker Capital Partners, the European family office of the van Rappard family, with the founders retaining a minority interest and advisory-board roles. The company reported 925 employees and €630 million turnover for 2025 (890 employees and €580 million in 2023). In August 2025, AVM GmbH changed its corporate name to FRITZ! GmbH while keeping operations unchanged.
Products / operations. AVM designs and manufactures consumer broadband and home-networking hardware and software, developed in-house in Berlin and produced in Europe. Its product lines include FRITZ!Box routers and modems for DSL, cable, fiber (FTTH) and LTE/5G; FRITZ!Repeater Wi-Fi range extenders; FRITZ!Fon DECT telephony handsets; FRITZ!DECT smart-home devices (smart plugs, heating controls); FRITZ!Powerline adapters; and FRITZ!OS, the company's proprietary router firmware. It is the leading consumer router brand in Germany, with roughly half the German market for private-user routers. This is an operating company, not a patent-assertion entity.
Patent-litigation posture. The structured data shows 2 tracked cases, with AVM as defendant in both and as plaintiff in none — the profile of an operating company defending against assertion, not an NPE. Both suits were filed 2025-01-12 in the Eastern District of Texas (Judge Rodney Gilstrap), a venue historically favored by patent plaintiffs.
Notable cases / context. Both tracked matters are CommWorks Solutions, LLC v. AVM GmbH. CommWorks is a non-practicing entity and subsidiary of IP Investments Group LLC, which has run licensing campaigns over acquired wireless and broadband networking patents (including US 7,027,465, US RE44,904, US 6,832,249 and US 7,760,664) covering Wi-Fi multimedia/QoS and WPS provisioning — technologies present in AVM's router and networking products. Unified Patents has challenged CommWorks patents at the PTAB, including a 2023 final decision holding US 8,923,846 unpatentable. No merits rulings in the AVM cases are reflected in the tracked data.
CommWorks sued AVM GmbH (also docketed as AVM Corp) in E.D. Tex.; the case was dismissed without prejudice on 2025-06-19. Exhibit E mapped WMM of the FRITZ!Box 7390 to US 7,027,465 and RE44,904.
CommWorks Solutions, LLC sued AVM GmbH (docketed in one source as 'AVM Corp') in E.D. Tex.; the '596 patent was asserted. First Amended Complaint filed Feb 6–7, 2025; willfulness alleged from a Feb 2, 2022 notice letter. Outcome not confirmed.