“Managing intellectual property across formulations, process optimization, and research collaborations required more structure. Tangibly gave us the ability to centralize and protect proprietary innovations while streamlining our internal documentation processes. It has helped us move faster and operate with more confidence.”
Davis Fundi Ireri
R&D Manager, Sentara Group
About Sentara Group
Sentara Group is an innovation-driven company focused on research, formulation development, and bioconversion workflows. As the company advances proprietary processes and collaborates across internal teams, research partners, and external stakeholders, protecting confidential knowledge is critical to maintaining ownership, reducing risk, and supporting long-term growth.
Challenge
As Sentara’s R&D activity expanded, the company needed a more structured way to manage proprietary information across formulations, process optimization, and research collaborations. Valuable knowledge lived across systems, teams, and workflows, making it difficult to consistently document what was confidential, who had access to it, and how it should be protected.
This created practical challenges for both R&D and legal teams. Manual tracking and ad hoc documentation made it harder to demonstrate ownership, prepare for audits or IP reviews, and clearly define IP boundaries with third-party collaborators.
Sentara needed a centralized system to identify, categorize, and govern its most important intangible assets while making the process easy enough for technical teams to adopt.
Solution
Tangibly provided Sentara with a SaaS platform purpose-built to identify, manage, and govern trade secrets. The platform gave Sentara’s R&D and legal teams a centralized place to document proprietary records, categorize confidential knowledge, and manage access to sensitive information.
With Tangibly, Sentara was able to replace manual tracking with structured workflows, built-in governance policies, and audit-ready records. The platform supported documentation across inventions, in-process ideas, formulations, process improvements, and research outcomes, helping the company create clearer boundaries around what needed to be protected.
Tangibly also helped Sentara bring more consistency to third-party collaboration by defining documented IP boundaries and improving visibility into how confidential knowledge was shared and governed.
Results
With Tangibly, Sentara brought greater structure and visibility to its R&D intellectual property. The platform helped the company centralize proprietary records, improve searchability, and create a more consistent process for documenting confidential knowledge across teams.
By replacing manual tracking with structured workflows and audit-ready records, Sentara reduced the burden of IP reviews and strengthened its ability to demonstrate ownership and reasonable measures. The company also gained a clearer framework for third-party collaboration, helping ensure sensitive information was governed by documented IP boundaries.
The result was a more organized, defensible, and scalable approach to protecting proprietary R&D knowledge.