Fenner Investments, Ltd. is a Texas limited partnership with a principal place of business at 600 Goodwin Dr., Richardson, Texas, per its own complaints. Texas Secretary of State records show it was formed on September 21, 2000 (D&B lists 2001), with registered agent Peter R. Fenner, an inventor-attorney who is named as inventor on several of its patents. It is privately held, effectively family-controlled, and associated with another entity, Lightbus Technology, Inc. Business-directory data (D&B) estimates roughly one employee and annual revenue near $68,000; no audited financials are public, so size figures should be treated as estimates.
Fenner has no operating business: it does not manufacture or sell products, and its own filings describe it as holding patent rights. It is best characterized as a patent-holding/assertion entity (non-practicing entity) that acquired patents from large technology companies and asserted them against industry defendants. Its portfolio spans several technology areas: PCS/mobile-user communications-network management (U.S. 5,561,706; 6,819,670; 6,299,763 family), packet routing/switching and source-address filtering (U.S. 5,842,224; 7,145,906), and an analog joystick port interface (U.S. 6,297,751, acquired from Lucent Technologies in April 2006).
Consistent with the case data, Fenner appears only as a plaintiff (2 tracked cases, 0 as defendant), fitting the classic NPE profile. Both tracked suits were filed in the plaintiff-friendly U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas, Tyler Division, and other documented Fenner suits were filed in the same venue. It does not appear as a two-way litigant.
Notable tracked matters are Fenner Investments, Ltd. v. Juniper Networks, Inc. et al. (filed Jan. 6, 2005), a multi-defendant communications-network case naming Juniper, Nokia, Nortel, Lucent, Cisco, Alcatel and Ericsson, and Fenner Investments, Ltd. v. Cellco Partnership d/b/a Verizon Wireless et al. (filed July 6, 2011) over the '706 patent. In the Verizon case the district court found no infringement of claim 1; the Federal Circuit affirmed in February 2015. Public reporting also documents suits against Microsoft, Nintendo, Sony and 3Com/network-equipment vendors, several ending in dismissal or summary judgment against Fenner.