US 11985185

I'll search for authoritative information on US 11,985,185, including any litigation or CAFC docket activity.

Let me drill down on litigation and any CAFC 2026 docket activity specifically naming this patent.

Let me run a couple more targeted checks on IPR activity and specific assertion of this patent.

US Patent 11,985,185 — Summary

Important scope note: I searched for this specific number (11985185 / "11,985,185"). I found no PTAB proceeding, district-court docket, or Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit 2026 docket that specifically names this patent. I did find a related family of Wiz patents in active litigation (details below), but I want to be explicit that any statement tying this patent to a CAFC 2026 appeal would be unsupported. The closest active matters involve sibling patents in the same family, not '185 itself.

1. Bibliographic data (from the authoritative Google Patents full text and corroborating news/aggregator records)

Continuation chain (priority): 17/109,883 (now US 11,431,786) → 17/819,442 (now US 11,722,554) → 18/341,134 (now US 12,381,939) → 18/478,534 (this patent). Later family members: 18/479,573 (US 12,273,412), 18/887,753 (US 12,192,270), 18/888,981 (US 12,255,948), and 19/047,259 (US20250358330A1, pending).

2. Abstract (verbatim)

"A method and system for providing textual insights on objects deployed in a cloud environment are provided. The method includes collecting object data on objects deployed in the cloud environment, wherein objects are deployed and operable at different layers of the cloud environment; identifying objects deployed in the cloud environment; constructing a visual representation of the cloud environment, including the identified objects and their relationships; and generating textual insights on the identified objects and their relationships using natural language processing."

⚠️ Note an internal inconsistency worth flagging: the abstract (and the SUMMARY section) describes natural-language textual insights, but the granted claims are drafted to network vulnerability detection based on network path exposure. The claims are the operative scope; the abstract does not match the claim language.

3. Plain-language overview of the independent claims

Claim 1 — Method for detecting network vulnerability based on network path exposure. Four ordered steps:

1. Collect network object data about multiple network objects deployed in a cloud computing environment.
2. Construct a network graph from that collected data, where the graph includes the network objects identified in the cloud environment.
3. Determine relationships between the identified objects in the graph — the relationships include descriptions of connections between objects.
4. Analyze the graph and the relationships to generate insights, where the insights include determining that a network object is exposed to an external network; and then tag the network objects in the graph for which that insight was generated.

Claim 6 — Non-transitory computer-readable medium. Structurally identical to claim 1, recast as a set of stored instructions that, when executed by one or more processors of a device, cause the device to perform the same five operations (collect → construct graph → determine relationships → analyze to generate exposure insights → tag).

Claim 7 — System. Again the same substantive operations, implemented as a system comprising processing circuitry and a memory containing instructions that configure the system to: collect network object data; construct the network graph; determine object relationships (descriptions of connections); analyze the graph/relationships to generate insights including that a network object is exposed to an external network; and tag the corresponding objects. So the three independent claims are a method/CRM/system triad with essentially the same limitations — a common drafting pattern in this family.

Dependent claims (2–5, 8–11; mirrored across the method and system sets):

• 2 / 8 — the exposure is a cross-environment exposure.
• 3 / 9 — the insights include a connection which is unauthorized.
• 4 / 10 — further comprising determining a number of transmissions between the network object and the external network (a hop/traversal count).
• 5 / 11 — generating an insight indicating that an administrator interface is exposed to an external network.

4. Litigation / PTAB landscape found in searches (context, not this patent)

The operative dispute is Orca Security Ltd. v. Wiz, Inc., C.A. No. 1:23-cv-00758-JLH-SRF (D. Del.), stayed pending IPR. Patents in play there are Orca's '031, '032, '685, '809, '926, '326 and Wiz's 11,722,554; 11,929,896; 11,936,693; 12,001,549; 12,003,529 — none of which is 11,985,185. Relevant PTAB status reported in a January 2026 joint notice:

• IPR2024-00863/-864/-865 (Orca's '031, '032, '685): all claims held unpatentable Dec. 8, 2025; FC notice-of-appeal deadline noted as Feb. 9, 2026.
• Orca's IPRs against Wiz patents: IPR2025-01083 (11,722,554) and IPR2025-01086 (12,001,549) — institution denied Dec. 15, 2025; IPR2025-01084 (11,929,896) and IPR2025-01085 (11,936,693) instituted, FWD due Dec. 15, 2026.

Because 11,722,554 is in the same family/specification as '185, activity on '185 in 2026 is plausible but not something my searches confirmed. I would not assert it.

One literal-data caveat: an AO-120 filing in the Delaware docket lists Wiz counterclaim patent "11,772,554 B2," while the docket text elsewhere refers to "11,722,554." Per your instruction I am reporting the number literally as printed and not auto-correcting it, but flagging the discrepancy for verification.

5. Confidence and uncertainties

• High confidence: number, title, assignee, inventors, application/filing/issue dates, priority, the 11-claim set and the text of the independent claims (source: the full Google Patents text at https://patents.google.com/patent/US11985185/en, corroborated by the Targeted News Service grant notice and Golden aggregator record).
• Not confirmed: primary examiner; any CAFC 2026 appeal docket specifically naming 11,985,185; any IPR challenging 11,985,185. I could not find authoritative evidence for these, so I am not stating them as fact.
• Caveat on legal status: "Active"/"expiration 2040-12-02" are Google Patents assumptions, not legal conclusions.

I'll research litigation involving US 11985185. Let me run several targeted searches.

Let me search for litigation specifically involving Wiz Inc. and this patent family.

Bottom line

Based on the public sources I was able to reach, I could not confirm any litigation in which U.S. Patent 11,985,185 itself was named as an asserted patent (patent-in-suit). What does exist is a well-documented litigation involving the same patent family — Wiz's cloud‑security patent family that includes 11,985,185 — namely Orca Security Ltd. v. Wiz, Inc., in which Wiz counterclaimed on family member U.S. 11,722,554. I flag this distinction clearly because you asked me not to conflate similar numbers or near-misses.

Why I believe 11,985,185 is litigation-adjacent but not confirmed as asserted

• The Google Patents page for US 11,985,185 carries the field flag "Family has litigation — First worldwide family litigation filed," with a Darts‑IP link for family ID 83007647: https://patents.google.com/patent/US11985185/en. That flag attaches to the family, not necessarily to the '185 patent individually.
• The '185 patent is a continuation of U.S. 18/341,134, which is a continuation of 17/819,442 (now U.S. 11,722,554), which is a continuation of 17/109,883 (now U.S. 11,431,786) — all filed Dec. 2, 2020, same inventors (Keren, Hershko Shemesh, Reznik, Luttwak, Berkovitz), same assignee (Wiz, Inc.). See https://patents.google.com/patent/US11985185/en.
• In the Orca/Wiz case, Wiz's five asserted patents were 11,722,554; 11,929,896; 11,936,693; 12,001,549; and 12,003,529 — i.e., the '554 sibling, not the '185. Source: Wiz/Orca Joint Claim Construction Chart, D. Del. C.A. No. 23‑758 (JLH).
• In the same case, Orca's six asserted patents were 11,663,031; 11,663,032; 11,693,685; 11,726,809; 11,740,926; and 11,775,326 — none of which is 11,985,185.

So the family is unquestionably in litigation, but on the record I found, the '185 patent number does not appear as a patent-in-suit.

Case involving the family (the closest verified match)

Sources: Docket Alarm docket listing for Orca Security Ltd. v. Wiz, Inc., D. Del. 1:23‑cv‑00758 (flags: CLOSED; including D.I. 238 "SO ORDERED, re 237 Stipulation of Dismissal with prejudice," Jan. 13, 2026) — https://www.docketalarm.com/search/?q=patent%3A%2811740926%29 ; Joint Claim Construction Chart listing both sides' patents — https://ptacts.uspto.gov/ptacts/public-informations/petitions/[1557988](/patent/1557988)/download-documents ; D. Del. opinion page for 23‑758 (Oct. 22, 2024) — https://www.ded.uscourts.gov/opinion/orca-security-ltd-v-wiz-inc-0 ; dismissal reported by BankInfoSecurity — https://www.bankinfosecurity.asia/orca-wiz-end-dueling-lawsuits-over-cloud-security-patents-a-30463 ; CourtListener docket — https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/67600951/orca-security-ltd-v-wiz-inc/.

Parallel administrative proceedings (not litigation, but relevant)

Wiz filed IPR petitions against all six Orca asserted patents (e.g., IPR2024‑00863, ‑00864, ‑00865, ‑01109; IPR2025‑00095, IPR2025‑01085), and Orca filed petitions against several Wiz patents. IPR petitions are PTAB proceedings, not district-court or CAFC litigation. I did not verify in these results whether any Orca-filed IPR petition targeted 11,985,185 specifically, so I will not assert that it did.

Explicit negative findings and caveats

1. No case found in which US 11,985,185 is a named asserted patent. Unified Patents' litigation caselist (https://portal.unifiedpatents.com/litigation/caselist) was not surfaced for this number in my searches; I also did not find a PACER or CAFC docket captioned around '185.
2. No CAFC appeal identified involving 11,985,185 specifically. (The Federal Circuit appeal activity I saw concerned the '358/'595 patents in an unrelated case, and the ''358 Patent' appeal in Brightex v. L'Oréal — a different matter entirely.)
3. False positive to disregard: a UK Companies House entry in the London Gazette lists company number 11985185 (KHD Services Limited) — a company registration number, not the patent. Do not treat that as litigation.
4. Search coverage limitation: I was unable to run a Darts‑IP or PACER query directly; the "family has litigation" flag on the Google Patents page (Darts‑IP family ID 83007647) is the strongest indicator that some member of this family has been litigated, which is consistent with Wiz's assertion of family member 11,722,554 in Orca v. Wiz. If you need certainty on whether '185 itself was ever pleaded (e.g., in a later‑amended counterclaim or a separate suit), the authoritative check is a PACER/RECAP docket-text search on "11,985,185" and a Darts‑IP family lookup on family 83007647 — I could not complete those direct queries within the sources available to me, and I will not fill that gap with speculation.

Summary: One litigation is known involving the patent's family — Orca Security Ltd. v. Wiz, Inc., D. Del. No. 1:23‑cv‑00758‑JLH‑SRF, filed July 12, 2023, dismissed with prejudice January 13, 2026 — but that case asserted U.S. 11,722,554, not U.S. 11,985,185. I found no litigation in which U.S. 11,985,185 was itself asserted.

I'll start by verifying the structured data against live sources, since the ODP block states no proceedings are on file.

Key finding: the structured block says no proceedings against the '185 patent, but there's a related Wiz/Orca dispute. Let me check whether any Orca petition targeted the '185 patent itself or its family.

Let me specifically confirm whether any petition ever targeted the '185 patent number itself, and check the litigation status.

PTAB / AIA Trial Proceedings — US 11,985,185 B2 ("System and method for analyzing network objects in a cloud environment," Wiz, Inc., priority 2020-12-02, granted 2024-05-14)

Proceedings overview

There are zero AIA trial proceedings on US 11,985,185. The structured "PTAB proceedings on file" block (USPTO Open Data Portal) returns no IPR, PGR, or CBM for this patent, and my independent web searches of PTAB docket trackers, PTAB E2E document collections, CourtListener, and press coverage surfaced no petition ever filed against this patent number — so the breakdown is 0 active / 0 claims invalidated / 0 claims sustained / 0 settled / 0 institution denied. The defensive posture this gives a defendant is not "the patent is hardened" — it is "the patent is untested." Be precise about that distinction with your client or the court: a patent with an institution denial on the merits (like its parent) has at least survived a § 314 screening; a patent with no PTAB history at all has survived nothing and confirmed nothing. There is no FWD, no certificate under § 318(b), and therefore no § 315(e)(2) estoppel running in anyone's favor against '185. Conversely, because the '185 specification is in the same family as a patent that was recently attacked, there is usable intelligence about how the Board reads the core limitation — see below.

Important scope note

I found no proceeding whose patent number is 11,985,185. What the public record does contain is a large, now-concluded Wiz/Orca patent war built on sibling and parent patents of '185 — including U.S. 11,722,554, which is the direct parent application of the '185 patent (per the '185 front page: '185 is a continuation of 18/341,134, which is a continuation of 17/819,442, now U.S. 11,722,554, which is a continuation of 17/109,883, now U.S. 11,431,786). Those proceedings are set out below, clearly flagged as not proceedings on this patent. They do not cancel, confirm, narrow, or estop anything as to '185's claims 1–11. Treat them as claim-construction and prior-art intelligence only.

Family-adjacent proceedings (NOT proceedings on US 11,985,185)

IPR2025-01083 — Orca Security Ltd. v. Wiz, Inc. (U.S. 11,722,554 B2 — direct parent of the '185 patent)

• Type: Inter Partes Review
• Filed: 2025-06-04
• Status: Institution Denied (terminated 2025-12-15)
• Judge panel: APJs Karl D. Easthom, Nabeel U. Khan, and Lisa A. Murray (Tech Center 2400, Art Unit 2447) — from the DocketAlarm/Track Docket case page.
• Petition grounds: All-obviousness challenge to claims 1–5, 7–16, and 18–21. Ground 1: Shivamoggi (U.S. 11,770,387) alone; Ground 2: Shivamoggi + Zhong (U.S. 10,693,743) for the multi-cloud claims; Ground 3: Shivamoggi + Woolward (U.S. Pub. 2020/0382560). (Note: secondary case-law databases render the Shivamoggi number inconsistently as 11,770,381 vs. 11,770,387 — verify against the petition before relying on it. Secondary sources only; I have not read the petition itself.)
• Institution decision: Denied 2025-12-15. The Board found Orca failed to show a reasonable likelihood of prevailing on any challenged claim. The key failure, per the secondary summary, was claim 1[d]: the prior art's "suspected attack paths" were not the claimed "list of abnormal connections" in natural-language form. Before the merits decision, Deputy Director Coke Morgan Stewart issued a 2025-10-17 decision referring the petitions to the Board and rejecting Wiz's discretionary-denial (Fintiv-type) request, reasoning there is no district-court trial date (case stayed), minimal district-court investment, and the patents are too young for strong settled expectations. Wiz's opposition also pressed an "unfair dealings" theory (that Wiz used Orca's prosecution counsel and copied Orca's disclosures). This is a Director-level discretionary decision, not an institution decision.
• Final Written Decision: None — never instituted.
• Settlement / termination: No settlement. Petitioner filed a Request for Refund of Post-Institution Fees on 2026-02-11; the Board approved the refund 2026-02-19 (Paper 13) — a strong practical tell that Orca abandoned the challenge.
• Appeal: None identified.
• Defensive value: This is the single most useful piece of PTAB intelligence about the '185 specification: the Board has already credited the patent owner's reading that a generic "suspected attack path" disclosure does not teach a natural-language "list of abnormal connections." Because the '185 claims (and its parent '554) spring from the same 2020-12-02 priority document, a defendant's § 103 theory will need art that expressly renders the natural-language insight output, not merely anomaly detection. But note the limits: a denial is not a validity holding, creates no estoppel, and Orca's loss was on the record it built — a better-resourced petition with better art is not barred.
  • Docket: https://www.docketalarm.com/cases/PTAB/IPR2025-01083/Orca_Security_Ltd._v._Wiz_Inc/
  • Director decision (PDF): https://ptacts.uspto.gov/ptacts/public-informations/petitions/[1557990](/patent/1557990)/download-documents?artifactId=d6TFI_NTCHSxQpeShwZzgng0yqU0T6uxZURDru2MNXTriDWBbdQgY_A

IPR2025-01086 — Orca Security Ltd. v. Wiz, Inc. (U.S. 12,001,549 B1)

• Type: Inter Partes Review
• Filed: 2025-06-04
• Status: Not Instituted – Merits (institution denied 2025-12-15)
• Judge panel: Not confirmed from a primary source in my search results; the '083 panel (Easthom / Khan / Murray) appears on the parallel-track listings.
• Grounds / FWD / Appeal: No FWD (never instituted). No appeal identified.
• Defensive value: Same day, same result as '083 — reinforces that the Board is screening out the Orca obviousness theory on this family's core limitation. Source: joint status notice in Orca v. Wiz, C.A. No. 1:23-cv-00758 (D. Del.).

IPR2025-01084 — Orca Security Ltd. v. Wiz, Inc. (U.S. 11,929,896 B1)

• Type: Inter Partes Review
• Filed: 2025-06-04
• Status: Records conflict — flag for verification. The parties' 2025-12-15 joint notice to the Delaware court states the Board "Instituted (as to all claims) December 15, 2025," with an FWD due no later than 2026-12-15. The Unified Patents PTAB portal, however, lists IPR2025-01084 as "Settlement" with a termination date of 2026-01-14. Both cannot be the final word; the most likely reconciliation is institution on 2025-12-15 followed by an early termination/settlement in January 2026 (consistent with the global dismissal of the litigation on 2026-01-13), but I did not find the termination paper.
• FWD: None identified.
• Appeal: None identified.
• Defensive value: Low direct value for '185 — it is a different patent, and any settlement would leave no claim-level holding. Its value is purely as evidence of how the Orca/Wiz war ended (global peace, not a claim-cancellation spree).

IPR2025-01085 — Orca Security Ltd. v. Wiz, Inc. (U.S. 11,936,693 B2)

• Type: Inter Partes Review
• Filed: 2025-06-04
• Status: Records conflict — the 2025-12-15 joint notice states instituted as to all claims on 2025-12-15 (FWD due 2026-12-15); the Unified Patents portal lists it as "Settlement," terminated 2026-01-14.
• FWD: None identified.
• Appeal: None identified.
• Defensive value: As above; different patent, no claim-level holding located.

IPR2025-01087 — Orca Security Ltd. v. Wiz, Inc. (U.S. 12,003,529 B1)

• Type: Inter Partes Review
• Filed: 2025-06-04
• Status: Listed in the 2025-12-15 joint notice as instituted; FWD date not stated in the excerpt I retrieved. Verify current status on PTAB E2E — the January 2026 global dismissal likely moots it.
• FWD / Appeal: None identified.
• Defensive value: Different patent; no holding affecting '185.

Context: Wiz as petitioner (Orca's patents)

Wiz filed six-plus IPRs against Orca patents asserted in the same litigation: IPR2024-00220 ('735, denied — Orca disclaimed all challenged claims); IPR2024-00863, -00864, -00865 ('031, '032, '685 — instituted 2024-12-09; panel for -00865: APJs Zecher, Baer, Raevsky); IPR2024-01109 ('809, instituted 2025-01-16); IPR2024-01190 ('926, instituted 2025-01-22); plus the '326 petition. On 2025-12-08 the Board issued FWDs in IPR2024-00863/-00864/-00865 holding all challenged claims of Orca's '031, '032, and '685 patents unpatentable, which collapsed Orca's case and led to the 2026-01-13 stipulation dismissing the whole action with prejudice (D. Del. D.I. 238; Orca v. Wiz, C.A. No. 1:23-cv-00758). None of this touches US 11,985,185 — '185 was never an asserted patent in that case on the public record I reviewed. It does, however, prove the parties litigated each other's cloud-security portfolios to the ground, which makes the absence of any '185 challenge more conspicuous, not less.

Strategic summary

Claim status on '185. All eleven claims of US 11,985,185 — independent claim 1 (method), independent claim 6 (non-transitory CRM), independent claim 7 (system), and dependents 2–5 and 8–11 — are untested. None has been canceled, none has been confirmed, none has been given a Board construction, and no certificate of correction or § 318(b) certificate exists for this patent. Anyone who tells a defendant that this patent has been "hardened by PTAB" is misreading the record; the accurate statement is that it has never been examined adversarially at the Board. By contrast, the closest family analogue (the parent, U.S. 11,722,554) was attacked and the attack was screened out at institution on 2025-12-15 — a real but narrow win for the patent owner.

Estoppel landscape. § 315(e)(2) estoppel attaches only after a final written decision in an IPR. There is no FWD on '185, so no estoppel bars any party — including Orca — from raising any § 102/§ 103 ground based on patents or printed publications against '185's claims. Equally important: the Sotera stipulations Orca filed on 2025-08-14 (and Wiz's stipulation of 2024-10-10) by their terms reach only the specific patents named — Orca's stipulation covered U.S. 11,722,554, 11,929,896, 11,936,693, 12,001,549, and 12,003,529, not 11,985,185. And Wiz's 2024 stipulation covered Orca's '031, '032, and '685 patents. So a defendant facing '185 today has the full prior-art universe available: no estoppel, no § 315(a)(1) bar, no § 325(d) baggage from Orca's failed petition. The entire art space — including any art Orca used and lost on — remains fair game, though the Board's reasoning in the '554 denial tells you which type of art will be hardest to make stick.

Pattern signals. There is no defensive aggregator in this chain (no Unified Patents, RPX, or similar petitioner appears); the litigants are two operating cloud-security competitors. Orca petitioned against five Wiz patents but not against '185, despite '185 being in the same priority family — a gap worth probing in diligence (was '185 overlooked, is it not commercially relevant, or was it deliberately left for the district court?). Wiz, for its part, has a sophisticated PTAB practice (Wilson Sonsini as counsel) and pursued IPRs aggressively as a defendant, winning three outright cancellations. Both sides have now walked away from the litigation with prejudice, so a defendant facing '185 today may be dealing with a new assertion outside the Orca/Wiz frame — check who is actually asserting it before assuming the Wiz litigation posture carries over. I found no Federal Circuit appeal of any proceeding discussed here; the IPR2025-01083 refund request of 2026-02-11 (approved 2026-02-19) is consistent with Orca having let the denials go.

Recommended next steps

1. Do not represent to a court or client that '185 has PTAB history. State affirmatively: no AIA trial petition has ever been filed against US 11,985,185; no claim has been canceled or confirmed; no estoppel exists. If you need to certify that, pull the Patent Trial and Appeal Board's E2E record for the patent directly (https://ptacts.uspto.gov/ptacts/) rather than relying on any secondary tracker, and note the ODP ingest caveat in the prompt itself — a very recent filing can post-date the ingest.
2. Mine the IPR2025-01083 record for free claim-construction and prior-art intelligence. The institution-denial decision (2025-12-15) and the Deputy Director's 2025-10-17 referral decision are public on PTAB E2E and DocketAlarm. Read the Board's treatment of claim 1[d] of the '554 patent ("list of abnormal connections" in natural-language form) before you draft any § 103 theory against '185 claim 1 — as the '185 claims share that specification, you will need art that expressly discloses the natural-language insight output, not merely generic anomaly/attack-path detection. Confirm the prior-art citations (Shivamoggi, Zhong, Woolward) against the petition papers rather than the databases, which render the Shivamoggi number inconsistently.
3. Verify the '084 / '085 status conflict (instituted per the parties' 2025-12-15 court notice vs. "Settlement" per the Unified Patents portal, terminated 2026-01-14) on PTAB E2E before citing either. If those were settled, expect no claim-level holdings; if an FWD issues, read it — the Board's construction of the shared "abnormal connections / insights" limitation could be informative for '185 even without binding effect.
4. Track the district-court endgame. Orca Security Ltd. v. Wiz, Inc., C.A. No. 1:23-cv-00758 (D. Del.) was dismissed with prejudice on 2026-01-13 with each side bearing its own fees and a mutual undertaking not to re-assert the dismissed claims. That covenant binds Orca and Wiz only and says nothing about '185 (which was never asserted). If '185 is being asserted today, establish who the plaintiff is, its relationship (if any) to Orca or Wiz, and whether any license/covenant flowing from that dismissal reaches it.
5. If you are defending, treat '185 as a clean-slate invalidity target but budget for the natural-language limitation. Because there is no estoppel and no adverse claim construction, an IPR on '185 is procedurally unobstructed (subject only to § 315(b)'s one-year bar from service of a complaint). Statutory timing once instituted: institution decision within ~6 months of the petition under § 314(b), and an FWD within one year of institution under § 316(a)(11) (extendable up to six months for good cause) — useful for a stay motion, since the Board and the Federal Circuit treat the AIA's one-year clock as firm.

Caveat on completeness: I was able to run only a limited number of searches before hitting a tool limit. I found no proceeding against 11,985,185, and the ODP block agrees, but if you need a belt-and-suspenders negative, order the PTAB E2E "Patent Litigation/Proceeding" tab for the patent and confirm no IPR/PGR number is docketed against it.

I'll research the assignment record and ownership chain for US 11,985,185.

Let me pull the actual USPTO assignment records and check the corporate status of the assignee.

Let me try to locate the specific reel/frame and the correspondent of record.

Assignment & Ownership Analysis — US 11,985,185 B2

Source limitation, stated up front: I was able to confirm the existence and date of exactly one post-filing assignment event (via the Google Patents legal-events record for the patent) and to corroborate Wiz's recurring recording firm and customer number from a USPTO assignment cover sheet in the same corporate family. I was not able to query assignmentcenter.uspto.gov / assignment.uspto.gov directly in this session, so I do not have the reel/frame number or the named correspondent of record for the '185 assignment itself. I flag that gap rather than guess. Verification link: https://assignmentcenter.uspto.gov/ (search patent 11985185).

Inventors

All five named inventors were, per the inventor-to-company assignment, employees/founders of Wiz, Inc. at the time of filing — there is no third-party or university co-inventor, and no inventor assigned to anyone other than Wiz.

Source for residences/assignee: Targeted News Service grant notice, May 14, 2024 ("WIZ, INC., New York, New York has been assigned a patent… developed by five inventors…"), corroborating the Google Patents record.

Unusual-pattern check — NOT present. The "all inventors departed within 12 months of filing" precursor to a portfolio fire-sale does not apply. Two of the five (Luttwak, Reznik) were Wiz co-founders and remained with the company through the Google acquisition on 2026‑03‑11; Reznik and Luttwak are named on later Wiz patents (e.g., US 12,244,634, issued March 4, 2025). This is a founder-invented, employer-owned portfolio — the opposite of an abandoned-inventor pattern.

Original assignee

Wiz, Inc. (New York, NY) — named on the issued patent as both applicant and assignee.

• Primary line of business: cloud-native application protection platform (CNAPP) / cloud security. The company builds a "Security Graph" that ingests cloud object metadata and computes risk and exposure paths across AWS, Azure, GCP, Oracle Cloud and Kubernetes — i.e., the product is directly on-point with the '185 claims (collect object data across cloud layers → build a graph of objects and their connections → derive exposure insights).
• Shipped a product embodying the claims? Yes, on the record available. Wiz commercially shipped the Wiz platform (surpassing $1B ARR in 2025 per multiple March 2026 reports on the Google deal). This is an operating-company product, not a licensing shell.
• Corporate status: Acquired. Google/Alphabet announced the $32B all-cash acquisition on 2025‑03‑18; DOJ review terminated/cleared November 2025; European Commission unconditional approval 2026‑02‑10; deal closed 2026‑03‑11, with Wiz operating as a distinct branded product line inside Google Cloud. (Sources: TechCrunch 2026‑03‑11; Wiz blog "It's Official: Wiz Joins Google!"; AK&M 2026‑03‑12; Business Insider Markets 2026‑03‑11; Wedbush MarketMinute 2026‑02‑12.)
• Record owner today: On the evidence I have, Wiz, Inc. remains the USPTO record owner. Alphabet acquired the Wiz entity; that is a share/merger acquisition, not a patent assignment, and I found no recorded assignment of '185 to Google LLC or Alphabet Inc. in the Google Patents legal-events field for this patent. If Google later re-records the portfolio into a Google entity, a new reel/frame will appear at Assignment Center.

Assignment timeline

Chronological list of every recorded transfer I can substantiate:

• Executed date: not retrieved / recorded 2024‑03‑12 — Reel not retrieved (Google Patents legal-events field does not expose reel/frame; Assignment Center not directly queried)
  • Conveyance: Assignment (Google Patents labels the event "ASSIGNMENT OF ASSIGNORS INTEREST" / reassignment; the underlying instrument is an inventor-to-company assignment of rights, not a security agreement, merger, or change of name)
  • Assignor: Ami Luttwak; Avihai Berkovitz; Shai Keren; Roy Reznik; Daniel Hershko Shemesh (all five named inventors, jointly)
  • Assignee: Wiz, Inc. (One Manhattan West, 57th Floor, New York, NY 10001 — address taken from a Wiz assignment cover sheet in the same corporate family, app. 18/357,845)
  • Correspondent: Not retrieved for '185. Cross-family context: Wiz's assignment cover sheets for sibling applications were submitted by Michael Ben-Shimon of M&B IP Analysts, LLC, USPTO Customer Number 122066 (submission 508029038, filed 2023‑07‑25, app. 18/357,845, "System and Method for Applying a Policy on a Network Path"). I flag this as a recurring firm on Wiz filings, but not as a confirmed entry on this chain — see signal 3 below for why it is not an NPE finding.
  • Context: Internal chain-of-title perfection by the original employer. This is the original assignment, not a transfer to a third party. Notably the recording date (2024‑03‑12) falls in the same window in which Wiz moved its patents into an assertion posture — its AO‑120 filing in Orca Security Ltd. v. Wiz, Inc., No. 1:23‑cv‑00758‑JLH (D. Del.) lists Wiz patents added by answer/counterclaim on 2024‑06‑04. '185 is not among the asserted patents; the temporal proximity is context, not causation, and I label it as inference only.

No other recorded assignment exists. There is no assignment to Google/Alphabet, no security agreement, no license recordation, and no intervening NPE LLC anywhere in the chain. The '185 patent has been continuously held by its original operating-company assignee from filing to the present.

Timeline diagram

timeline
    title Ownership of US 11985185
    2020 : Wiz founded January 2020
         : Priority application filed 2 December
    2023 : Continuation filed as 18/478,534
    2024 : Inventor assignment recorded to Wiz Inc
         : Patent issued 14 May 2024
    2025 : Google agrees to acquire Wiz in March
    2026 : Google closes 32 billion Wiz acquisition

NPE / troll-pattern signals

1. Shell-entity transfer — not present. The only recorded link is inventors → Wiz, Inc., an operating cloud-security vendor at a real corporate HQ (One Manhattan West, 57th Floor, New York, NY 10001). No "IP / Holdings / Licensing / Ventures" LLC appears anywhere. No registered-agent-service address, no single-purpose Delaware or Texas vehicle.

2. Known asserter in the chain — not present. Neither the original assignee nor any successor matches Acacia, Marathon Patent Group, Intellectual Ventures, IPNav, Wi‑LAN, Mosaid/Conversant, Vringo, Pendrell, Innovatio, MPHJ, Lumen View, Round Rock, Document Generation Corp, Spangenberg entities, or any Unified Patents / RPX high-frequency-plaintiff list I can access. Wiz, Inc. is the plaintiff-side operating company in Orca Security Ltd. v. Wiz, Inc., not an NPE.

3. Repeat correspondent across the chain — not present (single link; cannot recur). With only one recorded link there is no in-chain recurrence, which is the actual signal. Cross-family note for completeness: M&B IP Analysts, LLC (Customer No. 122066) and submitter Michael Ben-Shimon appear repeatedly on Wiz prosecution/assignment paperwork (e.g., submission 508029038, app. 18/357,845, recorded 2023‑07‑25). Per the analytical rule in the brief, this is not a finding: M&B is a conventional patent prosecution firm using a USPTO customer number, doing portfolio work for an operating company, and there is no Unified Patents / RPX / Patent Progress listing tying it to NPE assertion activity in my sources.

4. Cascading transfers — not present. One assignment in nearly six years of pendency. No chained LLCs, no shared correspondent addresses, no common principals.

5. Pre-litigation transfer — not present as to '185. The recorded assignment (2024‑03‑12) precedes Wiz's June 4, 2024 counterclaim patents by roughly three months, but '185 is not asserted in the Delaware action, so no transfer was arranged to enable assertion of this patent. Sibling patents in the family (11,722,554; 11,929,896; 11,936,693; 12,001,549; 12,003,529) are the asserted ones.

6. Bankruptcy fire-sale — not present. No bankruptcy of Wiz, Inc. or any predecessor; the entity exited via a $32B cash acquisition.

7. Privateering — not present. Nothing in the record shows Wiz transferring patents to a third-party asserter to sue competitors on its behalf. Wiz asserts in its own name as the operating company (and is equally the target of Orca's complaint). Note that the Google acquisition creates a different structural concern — alignment of Wiz's portfolio with Google Cloud against AWS/Azure/Orca — but that is vertical integration, not privateering, and no assignment effectuates it.

8. Defensive aggregator — not present. The chain does not terminate at RPX, AST, LOT Network, Unified Patents, or OIN. The '185 patent has not been neutralized.

Cross-reference / contradiction check: My earlier section flagged that the AO‑120 uses the literal string "11,772,554 B2" where the docket elsewhere reads "11,722,554." Nothing in this assignment analysis resolves or contradicts that; it remains an unresolved literal-data discrepancy and does not involve '185. The claim-scope/abstract mismatch flagged earlier (abstract recites NLP textual insights; granted claims recite network-path-exposure vulnerability detection) also stands and is unaffected by the assignment record.

Verdict

Operating-company assertion.

Justification: the sole recorded transfer on this patent runs from the five named inventors to Wiz, Inc. on record 2024‑03‑12 — an inventor-to-employer assignment, not a transfer to an NPE — and Wiz, Inc. is a real, shipping cloud-security vendor whose CNAPP/Security Graph product reads on the claim language, with founders Luttwak and Reznik (two of the five inventors) still with the company at close. Zero shell-entity, cascading-transfer, known-asserter, privateering, bankruptcy, or defensive-aggregator signals are present in the chain, and the current record owner is the same operating company that filed the priority application on 2020‑12‑02. The nuance I will not paper over: '185 itself is not among the Wiz patents asserted in Orca v. Wiz (see the 2024‑06‑04 AO‑120 listing), so the family — not this specific patent — is where the litigation posture sits; the ultimate parent became Alphabet Inc. via the 2026‑03‑11 entity acquisition rather than via any patent assignment.

Verify at: https://assignmentcenter.uspto.gov/ and https://patents.google.com/patent/US11985185/en

I'll research the specific patent and its cited prior art.

Let me drill into the front-page references and the USPTO record specifically.

Prior-Art Analysis — US Patent 11,985,185 B2

Analysis date: The task header states April 26, 2026; my operating date is October 1, 2026. Flagging the discrepancy rather than silently reconciling it — it does not change the substance below, but any "as of" statement should be read against the later date.

Bottom line up front: I was able to verify the patent's identity and bibliographic record, but I was not able to retrieve the front-page "(56) References Cited" / patent citation list for US 11,985,185 from the sources my searches reached. I will not fabricate that list. Below I separate (a) what is verified, (b) what I could not verify, and (c) the prior-art clusters that are contextually relevant but not confirmed as citations on '185's face.

1. USPTO/identity verification (high confidence)

The number resolves to exactly one patent; no similar-number collisions appeared in the results. The '185 claims are directed to detecting network vulnerability based on network path exposure (collect object data → construct network graph → determine relationships → generate insight that an object is exposed to an external network → tag the object) — consistent with the previously generated summary, and the abstract/claims mismatch flagged there still stands.

2. What I could NOT retrieve — and why this matters

The task asks me to "look at each patent citation for 11985185." I could not obtain the (56) citation list, so I cannot honestly enumerate the examiner- or applicant-cited references or map them to claims.

Reasons, stated plainly:

• The Google Patents full text supplied in the prompt is truncated before the "References Cited" section. What it does contain is a "Families Citing this family (95)" table — that is a forward-citation / Cited-By list, which is a different thing from the prior art cited against '185.
• My searches for "US11985185 cited references," "11985185 front page references cited," and similar returned either empty results or unrelated patents' search reports (e.g., scanner and surgical-device ISR tables). None returned '185's own (56) list.

⚠️ Do not treat the forward-citation table in the supplied text as prior art. Two hazards:

1. A cited-by reference postdating '185's 2020-12-02 priority is not §102 prior art at all.
2. The table mixes in entries such as Lacework, Inc. US 11,785,104 B2, US 11,973,784 B1, US 12,058,160 B1 ("Learning from similar cloud deployments," "Natural language interface for an anomaly detection framework," "Generating computer code for remediating detected events") carrying 2017-11-22/27 priority dates, and Fortinet patents. A 2017-priority document cannot have cited a 2024-issued patent; Google is grouping these at the family level. I therefore cannot assert that any of them appears on '185's face.

To complete the task properly, the authoritative sources to pull are:

• USPTO PatentCenter for application 18/478,534 → "References Cited" / PTO-892 and IDS listings.
• The granted-PDF front page at patentimages.storage.googleapis.com for US11985185 (the (56) block).
• Global Dossier / Espacenet family record (Family ID 83007647).

I flag these as the retrieval path rather than guessing at their contents.

3. What I could verify about the surrounding prior-art landscape (context, NOT citations on '185)

These are relevant by subject matter and/or date, but I have not confirmed they are cited on '185. Treat as leads to check, not as the answer.

3a. References named in the co-pending IPR against the sibling patent 11,929,896

From the PTAB institution record for IPR2025-01084 (Orca Security Ltd. v. Wiz, Inc.), the Board instituted on a combination of:

• Ross
• Agarwal
• Biran

The Board found the combination teaches "generic network entities from different cloud platforms, multi-dimensional graph generation, imputed entity creation, and database storage" (source: Arctic Invent case-law summary of IPR2025-01084; PTAB petition documents on ptacts.uspto.gov). These references are directed at the unified-graph-model claims of '896, not the exposure-detection claims of '185. I do not have the full patent numbers/publication data for Ross, Agarwal, or Biran, and I will not invent them. If they were also applied to '185, they would map most naturally to claim 1's "construct a network graph" and "determine relationships" limitations — not to the exposure/tagging limitations, which postdate the graph-construction art.

3b. Date-qualifying Wiz/Lacework cloud-security-graph art

The Lacework family with 2017 priorities (e.g., US 11,785,104 B2; US 11,973,784 B1; US 12,058,160 B1) predates '185's 2020-12-02 priority and is topically adjacent (cloud deployment learning, anomaly detection, NL interface). I list them as candidate §102 prior art by date only — I could not verify that any examiner or applicant cited them against '185.

4. §102 anticipation mapping — what I can and cannot say

I am not able to complete the requested per-reference §102 mapping because I could not obtain the reference list. Producing a table of citations with "anticipates claim X" entries without having actually seen the cited references would be fabrication, which I am instructed to avoid.

5. Substantive observation on where §102 art would have to land

Even without the (56) list, one structural point is defensible from the claim text itself: the independent claims' novelty-heavy limitation is the last step — generating an insight that a network object is exposed to an external network and tagging that object (claims 1, 6, 7), with dependents narrowing to cross-environment exposure (2/8), unauthorized connections (3/9), transmission/hop counts (4/10), and admin-interface exposure (5/11). The earlier steps (collect object data, build a node/link graph, derive relationships) are the crowded part of the art — which is exactly the region where the sibling-patent IPRs (Ross/Agarwal/Biran, above) are being fought. So the highest-value prior art to hunt for '185 specifically is art that traverses a cloud graph to an external-network boundary and tags the exposed object, i.e., "internet-exposure / reachability" art — not generic CMDB/graph art. My related 2026 searches on the Wiz portfolio surfaced exactly this theme in Wiz's own "reachability of objects … to an external network" filings (Justia/Wiz assignee listing), which are same-family/continuation documents and therefore not §102 art against '185 — they are evidence of the family's claim-drafting direction, not prior art.

6. Confidence and explicit gaps

• High confidence: the patent's identity, dates, assignee, and claim scope (claims 1–11), per the supplied full text and corroborating Justia/Google records.
• High confidence: that the "Families Citing this family (95)" block is a forward-citation list and is not the (56) prior-art list.
• Not established (do not rely on as fact): the actual examiner-cited and applicant-cited references for US 11,985,185; whether Ross, Agarwal, or Biran were cited against '185; whether any Lacework/Fortinet reference is on '185's face; any §102 anticipation conclusion.
• Recommendation: to finish this task, pull the (56) block from the granted PDF or PatentCenter for 18/478,534, then I can produce the requested full-citation / date / description / §102 claim-mapping table rigorously. I can do that immediately once the citation list is in hand.

I'll pull the operative "Prior Art" evidence for this record before drafting the §103 analysis. Let me run targeted searches.

Strong material on the sibling-patent IPRs. Let me pin down the key prior-art references' dates and the '185-specific record.

Obviousness Analysis — US 11,985,185 B2 under 35 U.S.C. § 103

Prepared: April 26, 2026 | Patent: US 11,985,185 B2 (Wiz, Inc.), app. 18/478,534, granted May 14, 2024, earliest claimed priority Dec. 2, 2020

0. Threshold evidentiary note about the "Prior Art" section of this page

I need to flag something before analyzing, because it conditions everything below.

The "Prior Art" portion of the supplied page (https://patents.google.com/patent/US11985185/en) contains only two things:

1. "Prior art keywords": network, objects, graph, identified, relationships — a Google-generated keyword extraction, not a legal prior-art statement.
2. "Families Citing this family (95)" — a forward-citation list (later documents that cite the Wiz '185 family), truncated in the supplied text after roughly 15 entries. The named assignees are Lacework, Inc. and Fortinet, Inc., with family priorities dated 2017‑11‑27.

Critically: the page as supplied does not include an examiner's "References Cited" list, an IDS, or a prosecution-history record for '185. Google Patents renders the "Citations / Cited By" blocks, not the PTO's Form 892. So I cannot, and will not, represent that any particular reference was "cited by the examiner during prosecution of '185" — I don't have that record.

Two further cautions on the citing (not cited) families:

• A "citing" relationship is the reverse of prior art. US 11,785,104 B2, for example, published 2023‑10‑10; its own application 17/671,199 was filed 2022‑02‑14. On its face, that is later than '185's Dec. 2, 2020 priority and therefore not prior art under § 102(a)(1).
• Its earlier family members could qualify under § 102(a)(2) (U.S. application publication "effectively filed" before Dec. 2, 2020), but that requires a Dynamic Drinkware showing that the relied-upon disclosure is supported by the 2017‑11‑27 provisional / 2018‑09‑18 parent. The Wiz Patent Owner made exactly that argument against Orca's Lal reference in IPR2025‑01086 ("Petitioner effectively relies on the provisional application itself as a prior art reference. Such an approach is improper."). Expect the same defense here.

Accordingly, the § 103 grounds below are built on the prior art actually in the record of this patent family — i.e., the references that have been charted against the sibling claims in the co-pending PTAB proceedings — plus the earlier-dated art identified above.

1. Governing framework and the scope of the claims

Because the earliest claimed priority is Dec. 2, 2020, the AIA version of § 103 applies. The Graham factors control: (1) scope and content of the prior art; (2) differences between the art and the claims; (3) level of ordinary skill; (4) secondary considerations. Under KSR Int'l v. Teleflex, 550 U.S. 398 (2007), the fourth Graham factor is not a rigid test — a POSITA's "creativity" is part of the analysis, and predictable combinations of known elements are obvious.

Two observations about claim scope that drive the entire analysis — and that I flagged in the earlier summary as an internal inconsistency:

1. No claim recites natural-language processing. The abstract and SUMMARY recite "generating textual insights … using natural language processing." Not one of claims 1–11 mentions NLP, text generation, or visual representation (note that "visual representation," recited in the abstract and in sibling '554 claim 1[b], was dropped from '185 claim 1 — '185 says only "constructing a network graph"). The claim is therefore materially broader than the abstract, not narrower. Any obviousness attack must treat the claim as the operative scope.
2. "Insight" is defined only by its content, not its form. In '185 claim 1 the insight is simply "determining that a network object is exposed to an external network." That is a result, not a technique. Under KSR, a claim to a known result achieved by known steps is obvious.

This means the only arguable point of novelty over the sibling '554 claims (currently in IPR) is the substitution of "exposure to an external network" for "abnormal connections" as the content of the insight — a difference in what the graph is queried for, not in how the graph is built.

2. Candidate prior art identified on the record

3. Grounds of rejection

Ground 1 — Claim 1 (and 6, 7) obvious over Shivamoggi alone, or Shivamoggi in view of Keren-type reachability art

Shivamoggi discloses every structural step of claim 1: (a) collecting network object data for nodes in AWS/Azure; (b) building a connection graph; (c) determining relationships including descriptions of connections (protocol, duration); (d) analyzing the graph to generate an insight; (e) tagging (GUI selection exposing node details). The only difference is the subject matter of the insight: Shivamoggi's graph is queried for abnormal/lateral-movement paths, '185's is queried for external reachability.

That difference is squarely within KSR's "predictable variation of a known device" and "use of a known technique to improve similar devices in the same way" rationales, and is independently bridged by the reachability art (Keren/Morgan), which teaches traversing the same kind of graph to determine that an object is accessibleFromInternet = true and to output a risk notification. Both references are in the same field (cloud security posture management), address the same problem (identifying which assets an attacker can reach), and a POSITA would have been motivated to add forward reachability traversal to Shivamoggi's graph to answer the "is it exposed?" question — the very question Shivamoggi's lateral-movement detection presupposes.

Ground 2 — Claims 2/8 (cross-environment exposure) obvious over Shivamoggi + Zhong (and/or Orca art)

Zhong teaches unified management and data collection across multiple separate cloud services via APIs and motivates the combination expressly (the shortcomings of disconnected single-platform consoles vs. jointly analyzed cross-provider information). A POSITA seeking to detect exposure across an organization's footprint would apply the graph/exposure analysis to the multi-cloud collection Zhong supplies. This is the same combination the Board is currently evaluating for the sibling '554 claims 2/3/13/14.

Ground 3 — Claim 3/9 (unauthorized connection) obvious over Shivamoggi, alone or with Shivamoggi + Keren

Shivamoggi concerns anomalous/lateral-movement connections, i.e., connections that should not exist; Wiz's own family specification describes unauthorized re-connection to a subnet as an "insight." The limitation is a near-tautological extension of the base graph analysis and adds nothing structural.

Ground 4 — Claims 4/10 (number of transmissions between the object and the external network) obvious over Shivamoggi/Keren + conventional graph traversal

The limitation is a hop count along a path. Both Shivamoggi (attack-path ranking/traversal) and the Keren-type reachability analysis (iterative path analysis through network interface → security group → public proxy) inherently determine path length. Independently, counting hops between two endpoints is one of the oldest and most notorious techniques in networking (TTL, traceroute) and its application to a network graph is a routine design choice — the epitome of a § 103 limitation. Wiz's own FIG. 3B describes this as the "9 hops" mode.

Ground 5 — Claims 5/11 ("administrator interface is exposed to an external network") obvious over any of Grounds 1–4

This claim does nothing but name one object type in the insight. Exposure analysis is object-type agnostic; the reference art identifies databases, proxies, VMs and load balancers without regard to type. Substituting "administrator interface" for "database" yields no new functionality. Notably, the phrase "an administrator interface … exposed to external networks" appears verbatim in the '185 specification (S240, high-level insights), undercutting any argument that the claim captures a distinct technical contribution.

Ground 6 — Alternative: the Lacework family

Lacework's "polygraph" family (priority 2017‑11‑27) builds graph models of network activity, detects anomalies, and includes "user login graphs," "privilege change graphs" and "machine server graphs" — i.e., object-and-relationship graphs of exactly the kind claimed, with external-connection detection (see the Lacework figure descriptions of a user "logging into a first machine … and then making an external connection"). If the Patent Owner cannot establish that the relied-upon disclosure is supported by the 2017 provisional, this ground weakens — but the pre‑Dec‑2020 publications in that family remain available as § 102(a)(1) art.

4. Motivation to combine (KSR rationales, consolidated)

1. Same field, same problem. All references target cloud-security posture management: enumerate cloud assets, model their connections, and find risk. Combination is not analogous-art crossing.
2. Express motivation in the art. Zhong criticizes disconnected single-provider consoles and touts cross-provider analysis. Shivamoggi presupposes identifying reachable nodes. Neither provides motivation to avoid the combination.
3. Predictable results. Adding a forward-reachability query to an existing connection graph produces a known output (exposed/not exposed) with no change in the underlying data structures.
4. Known techniques. API-based collection, graph construction, node/edge tagging, multi-cloud abstraction, and hop counting are all conceded, ubiquitous techniques. '185's Background itself concedes graph generation, protocol-agnostic traffic management, and object querying are known.
5. "Obvious to try" / finite number of identified solutions. Given one graph, the set of queries worth running (abnormal connections, exposure to the internet, unauthorized connections, cross-environment exposure) is small and bounded, and the '185 specification itself lists that set as the disclosure — a strong signal that the selection was conventional.

5. Significant counterweights, weaknesses, and caveats

I would be misleading you if I presented this as a clean-cut invalidity case.

1. ⚠️ Possible contradiction with the record: institution of IPR2025‑01083 may have been DENIED. The earlier-generated summary reports that Orca's Shivamoggi-based challenge to sibling '554 was denied institution on Dec. 15, 2025 (while IPR2025‑01084/‑01085 were instituted). If that is accurate, the Board did not find a reasonable likelihood that Shivamoggi renders '554 claim 1 — which is '185 claim 1 minus the "visual" limitation and with a different insight — unpatentable. The search result I retrieved for IPR2025‑01084 is consistent with institution there (panel of Judges Easthom/Murray/Khan assigned), but I could not retrieve the institution decision for ‑01083 itself in this session. I am flagging this as a direct contradiction to verify, not resolving it. A denial of institution is not a merits holding of validity and does not bind a court, but it would materially undercut a Shivamoggi-only § 103 theory.

2. Common ownership kills the best-mapped reference. The reference whose specification maps most literally onto the "exposed to an external network" + "tagging" limitations (Keren, US 11,374,982) appears to be Wiz's own patent. Under AIA § 102(b)(2)(C), a disclosure commonly owned at the time of filing is excepted from § 102(a)(2) prior art entirely. It survives only if it published before Dec. 2, 2020 (it appears to be a 2022 publication, US 2022/0286479 A1) — in which case it is available under § 102(a)(1)/§ 103, but that needs the exact filing/publication date confirmed, which I could not do within this session. Treat the Keren ground as conditional.

3. The dynamic prior-art date problem for the citing families. As discussed in § 0, forward-citing documents with 2022–2023 publication dates are presumptively not prior art; a Dynamic Drinkware showing is required.

4. Objective indicia are already live and adverse. Orca has put copying, commercial success, industry praise and skepticism into the PTAB record (IPR2024‑00863, Paper 38; Garmin-type discovery motion in the Wiz IPRs). Under WBIP those must be considered in every § 103 case, and they require a nexus showing — but a well-developed secondary-considerations record is the single biggest threat to these grounds. Note that Orca's own briefs concede Wiz's platform is "accused" of infringing and both parties allege copying; whichever direction the copying runs, it is evidence the art was viewed as insufficient.

5. Claim 1's breadth is a double-edged sword. Because claim 1 omits NLP, omits "visual" representation, and defines the insight only by outcome, the claim is easier to invalidate but harder for Wiz to defend on the strength of its specification. If the Board/Examiner instead reads "insights" in light of the specification as requiring natural-language generation, the analysis changes materially and the NLP references (e.g., Lacework's US 11,973,784 "Natural-language interface for an anomaly detection framework," in the citing list) would need to be added.

6. No '185-specific IPR found. I could not identify any IPR, reexam, or Federal Circuit 2026 appeal naming '11,985,185' specifically. All of the above art is documented only against sibling patents ('554, '896, '549). Applying it to '185 is my analytical inference, not a confirmed record fact.

6. Conclusion

On the four Graham factors, claims 1, 6, and 7 are likely obvious over Shivamoggi alone (or Shivamoggi in view of graph-reachability art), because every element except the content of the insight is expressly taught and the remaining difference is a predictable re-query of an existing graph for a known risk condition. Dependent claims 2–5 and 8–11 add only conventional techniques (multi-cloud/API collection via Zhong; hop counting; object-type substitution) and would fall with them. The strongest ground is a Shivamoggi-primary attack supplemented by multi-cloud and reachability art; the strongest counterweights are (i) the reported denial of institution on the Shivamoggi ground against sibling '554, (ii) the common-ownership exception disabling the most on-point reference, and (iii) Orca's objective-indicia record.

I recommend verifying before relying on any of this: the institution decisions in IPR2025‑01083 and ‑01085/‑01086; the filing and publication dates and ownership of Keren US 11,374,982; and whether any IPR or Federal Circuit appeal specifically names 11,985,185.