Acacia Research Corporation (NASDAQ: ACTG; commonly "Acacia") is a publicly traded American holding company incorporated in 1993. It is headquartered at 777 Third Avenue, New York, NY, having previously been based in Newport Beach, California. Starboard Value LP is its controlling shareholder. Acacia reports roughly 986–1,060 employees and FY2025 revenue of about $285 million (up from ~$122 million in FY2024), with a market capitalization in the ~$0.5 billion range.
Acacia operates four segments: Intellectual Property Operations (patent licensing and enforcement through subsidiary Acacia Research Group, LLC, covering portfolios such as Wi-Fi 6 and Wi-Fi 7 standard-essential patents, flash memory, IP networking, wireless networking, and internet search/advertising/cloud technologies); Industrial Operations (Printronix, industrial line-matrix printers and consumables); Energy Operations (Benchmark Energy II, oil and gas assets in Texas and Oklahoma); and Manufacturing Operations (Deflecto, specialty products for transportation, HVAC and office markets). Its IP arm explicitly does not invent or manufacture; it acquires patents and licenses/enforces them, historically returning roughly half of net licensing revenue to patent partners.
Litigation posture: Acacia is best known as one of the most prolific publicly traded patent assertion entities, reporting over 1,600 license agreements across nearly 200 portfolio programs and about $1.9 billion in gross licensing revenue, with subsidiaries filing hundreds of infringement suits. Our tracked database, however, contains only a single Acacia appearance — as a defendant — reflecting that most individual Acacia campaign suits are filed by its shell subsidiaries (e.g., SmartPhone Technologies, St. Lawrence Communications) rather than the parent.
Notable case: Futurewei Technologies, Inc. et al. v. Acacia Research Corp. et al. (C.D. Cal., Judge Andrew J. Guilford, filed April 4, 2012). Huawei/Futurewei filed a declaratory-judgment action in California one day after Acacia subsidiary SmartPhone Technologies sued it in the Eastern District of Texas over five Access Co. patents. The district court dismissed under the first-to-file rule; the Federal Circuit affirmed in Futurewei v. Acacia Research, 737 F.3d 704 (Fed. Cir. 2013), holding the third-party-beneficiary and alter-ego counts belonged in the Texas action.