Patent listing shows issue date for Inflatable Solar-Powered Light

LuminAID's official patents page publicly lists U.S. Patent No. 9,347,629 B2, titled "Inflatable Solar-Powered Light," with Anna Stork named as a co-inventor, showing an issue date of May 1, 2012 in the company's own patent listing. This entry appears alongside references to foreign counterpart patents protecting the same core invention in other jurisdictions.

While the USPTO's own proceedings record a different, later issue date of May 24, 2016 for the same patent number, LuminAID's published patent page nonetheless presents this May 2012 date to the public as part of its intellectual property portfolio, and it is included here as a documented entry directly tied to the invention's public record.

Regardless of the exact administrative date discrepancy, the underlying patent protected the mechanism at the heart of LuminAID's flagship product: a durable, inflatable, waterproof solar lantern designed originally for disaster relief and later adopted widely for outdoor recreation. The listing reflects the growing formalization of Stork and Sreshta's invention as their company scaled from a student project into an internationally distributed humanitarian and consumer product business.

This entry underscores the complexity of tracking intellectual property timelines for inventor-entrepreneurs building companies from the ground up while simultaneously pursuing formal patent protection.