ALEXANDRIA, Va., June 19 -- United States Patent no. 12,333,461, issued on June 17, was assigned to Maplebear Inc. (San Francisco).

"Iterative order availability for an online fulfillment system" was invented by Krishna Kumar Selvam (Cupertino, Calif.), Mouna Cheikhna (San Francisco), Michael Chen (San Francisco), Dylan Wang (Emeryville, Calif.), Joseph Cohen (New York), Tahmid Shahriar (New York), Graham Adeson (San Francisco) and Ajay Pankaj Sampat (San Francisco).

According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "An online concierge system iteratively makes a batch of one or more orders available to an increasing number of shoppers to choose to fulfill. Each shopper may choose to accept or reject a batch for f...