Stilta raises $10.5M from a16z and YC to help companies recover forgotten patents

Oskar Block could not stay away from business for long.

He was only 18 years old when he started his first startup, building machine learning for games. “I’ve always been drawn to solving complex data problems,” he told TechCrunch. He went on to consulting, where he helped companies with their AI integration strategies and learned what it takes for large enterprises to embrace the technology.

Block then worked at an independent trucking company, where he saw firsthand how slow the patent process was. The idea for his next company came one evening at dinner with a friend and colleague, Tobias Estreen, when Estreen’s father, a patent attorney, began to describe what his days looked like: “Reading the same kind of documents, as he had for thirty years,” Block recalled.

Block and Estreen saw the opening and collaborated with two others, Petrus Werner and Oscar Adamsson, to set it up Stilta, an AI platform designed to do the research and analysis behind patent litigation – the kind of heavy-handed work that has made patent litigation less efficient and more expensive. The startup announced a $10.5 million seed round on Tuesday, led by Andreessen Horowitz. Other investors include Y Combinator and staff from companies such as OpenAI, Legora, and Lovable.

Block, the company’s CEO, said Stilta works like a group of lawyers. Users enter the patent number into the program along with everything needed, and from there, a team of AI assistants gets to work, searching for other patents that can contradict what they are saying, tagging similar ones that might work, and pulling up the old patent history.

“They think in parallel and change the way a room full of experts would, but at any level no group of people is the same,” Block said, adding that the lawyer or expert using the platform is still “in the driver’s seat” in directing the analysis, not letting go. “The result is a case: report and claim charts with any evidence.”

Other companies in the space include Solve Intelligence and DeepIP. Legal technology has become a hot field amid the growing AI. Block said some areas of law enforcement are already seeing changes to AI, while other areas may not be ready for a long time.

This research, he said, is already being shaken by AI. Right now, people are still deciding the outcome of the cases. He added that many companies are still using patents that “were never established, never licensed, never properly reviewed because the cost of doing so was so low.”

That price barrier is what Stilta wants to bring down. Making patent litigation more efficient and cost-effective would open new doors for many companies that have left their IP on the shelf for too long and change the way they think about the value that resides within their patents.

“The question isn’t really whether regulation is going to prepare for AI,” Block said. “It’s like companies are ready for what’s possible when the analytics problem ends.”