Company: BLLN
Filing Date: 2025-12-10
Form Type: 10-Q
Source: 0001628280-25-056321
Chunk: 572

Company: BillionToOne, Inc.
Filing Date: 2025-12-10
Form: 10-Q
Item: Part I, Item 2
Chunk 572
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 parties to continue offering our products on terms that are not economically feasible, to re-engineer our product, to discontinue the sale of our products if re-engineering could not be accomplished on a timely basis, or to make generally available, in source code form, our proprietary code, any of which could adversely affect our business, financial condition and results of operations.

Obtaining and maintaining our patent protection depends on compliance with various required procedures, document submissions, fee payments and other requirements imposed by governmental patent agencies, and our patent protection could be reduced or eliminated for non-compliance with these requirements.

Periodic maintenance fees, renewal fees, annuity fees and various other governmental fees on patents and/or applications will be due to be paid to the USPTO and various governmental patent agencies outside of the United States at several stages over the lifetime of the patents and/or applications. We have systems in place to remind us to pay these fees, and we rely on our outside counsel and a third-party service provider to pay these fees due to patent agencies. The USPTO and various foreign governmental patent agencies require compliance with a number of procedural, documentary, fee payment and other similar requirements during the patent application process. We employ reputable law firms and other professionals to help us comply, and in many cases, an inadvertent lapse can be cured by payment of a late fee or by other means in accordance with the applicable rules. However, there are situations in which non-compliance can result in abandonment or forfeiture of the patent or patent application and thus loss of patent rights in the relevant jurisdiction. Such an event would allow our competitors to enter the unprotected market and have a material adverse effect on our business.

Patent terms may be inadequate to protect our competitive position for an adequate amount of time.

Patents have a limited lifespan. In the United States, if all maintenance fees are timely paid, the natural expiration of a patent is generally 20 years from its earliest U.S. non-provisional filing date. Various extensions may be available, but the life of a patent, and the protection it affords, is limited. Even if patents covering our products are obtained, once the patent life has expired, we may be open to competition. Given the amount of time required for the development, testing and regulatory review of our new products or technologies, patents protecting them might expire before or shortly after they are commercialized. As a result, our patent portfolio 

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may not provide us with a sufficient exclusivity period to exclude others from commercializing products similar or identical