RAP has pending patent applications here, in the US, in Europe,...

RAP has pending patent applications here, in the US, in Europe, and some countries in Asia. I don't believe any have been granted yet, but last I remember everything was still looking good.

What's stopping someone from reverse engineering it? From my understanding they're offering the service in two ways, one is embedded and the other is online. What this means is the user app is likely not to contain any important code (rather it'll send the cough to their server to compute and then send the result back to the user's app). But for use cases where there's no internet connection or it's spotty at best, they can embed the algorithm (run it natively on the device), this is likely only going to happen in the case of field testing in developing nations. So in reality someone is only going to get to reverse engineer it, if a business that has access to the embedded version breaks some agreement with RAP. In which case we could sue.

With that said, as this was a research project prior to starting the company. They have released papers on some of their findings (although as a company in the medical industry they'll probably still continue to do that, as it's quite common to share research).

Now let's assume worst case. A competitor comes out with a similar product using the same approach. One thing RAP still has in its favour is that its ML will have been trained on more data (how the results can keep improving). And when we start the US clinical trials or when we go to market, this will push it even further ahead.