Defendant
2 cases as defendant.
AliphCom, Inc. d/b/a Jawbone (also styled Aliph) was a San Francisco–based consumer electronics company founded in 1999 by Alexander Asseily and Hosain Rahman. It was privately held and venture-backed, raising roughly $900M+ from investors including Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Khosla Ventures, Kleiner Perkins, BlackRock, and the Kuwait Investment Authority; it reached a reported peak valuation of about $3.2B in 2014. Headcount was reported around 250 in 2011 and roughly 450 by 2014. The company was liquidated in July 2017 and is defunct; co-founder Rahman moved on to a separate health venture, Jawbone Health Hub.
Products / operations. Jawbone developed noise-suppression technology with DARPA/US Navy backing and commercialized it in Bluetooth headsets (Jawbone, Prime, Icon, Era) marketed under the "NoiseAssassin" brand. It later added the Jambox / Big Jambox / Mini Jambox wireless speakers and the UP line of wrist-worn activity and sleep trackers (UP, UP24, UP2, UP3, UP4). It acquired BodyMedia in 2013, adding multi-sensor physiological monitoring. It was an operating company, not a shell licensor.
Patent-litigation posture. In the tracked data Jawbone appears only as a defendant (0 plaintiff / 2 defendant appearances), both at the PTAB. These are Fitbit's 2016 inter partes review petitions against Jawbone-owned patents (including IPR2016-00607 on U.S. 8,529,811 and IPR2016-00714). Broader context: Jawbone and Fitbit litigated on both sides in 2015–2016, including Jawbone's ITC complaint (Inv. No. 337-TA-963) and Fitbit's ITC complaint (337-TA-973) plus parallel district court suits in Delaware and the Northern District of California. No Eastern District of Texas activity is reflected in the tracked data.
Aftermath. Jawbone's patent portfolio (~250+ US assets, much of it from BodyMedia) was liquidated and later transferred through JAWB Acquisition LLC/JI Audio Holdings to Jawbone Innovations, LLC, a Texas entity that began asserting former Jawbone microphone and audio patents against Samsung and others in 2021 — a separate NPE, not the operating company.
Inter partes review petition by Fitbit against AliphCom/Jawbone challenging claims of US 8,446,275. The Board instituted review on September 15, 2016 and issued a Final Written Decision on September 13, 2017; the specific claim-level outcome was not confirmed in the narrative.
Fitbit petitioned for inter partes review of claims 16-26 of the '811 patent. The PTAB instituted review and issued a final written decision holding those claims unpatentable.