Two former Palantir staff hoping to make use of AI to rework the method for submitting and managing patents have secured $20 million in funding for his or her London-based startup, Ankar.
The Sequence A funding spherical for Ankar was led by enterprise capital agency Atomico, with participation from Index Ventures, Norrsken, and Daphni. The corporate had introduced a £3 million ($4 million) seed spherical in Might that was led by Index, with assist from Daphni and Motier Ventures.
Ankar was based by Tamar Gomez and Wiem Gharbi in 2024. The pair met whereas working at Palantir, the place they each encountered the time-consuming strategy of making an attempt to acquire patents for brand new expertise. Gomez, who has a enterprise background, labored as a improvement strategist for Palantir, whereas Gharbi, who’s an information scientist by coaching, labored on machine studying functions. They took the title Ankar for his or her new firm from the title of an omniscient and highly effective knight present in pre-Islamic poetry.
“We are attempting to show IP that has been seen as a price middle for a really very long time into extra of a strategic and aggressive asset that we want right now in a world that’s changing into increasingly more aggressive,” Gharbi, who’s Ankar’s chief expertise officer, instructed Fortune.
The brand new funding for Ankar comes as mental property has change into more and more essential to company worth. Intangible belongings like IP now signify as much as 90% of the worth of S&P 500 corporations, in line with the World Mental Property Group. But the techniques for shielding these belongings stay stubbornly outdated, in line with Gomez and Gharbi, who say they witnessed how time-consuming and troublesome it’s to acquire a patent after they had been working at Palantir.
“To go from one thing that’s within the head of the inventor—an innovation—to one thing that could be a bankable asset that may be leveraged by the corporate within the type of a patent took years, principally,” Gomez, who’s Ankar’s CEO, mentioned. “The instruments to take action had been extremely legacy or simply non-existent. It was like a hodgepodge of guide processes.”
Patent attorneys can spend weeks looking a number of databases and studying patent filings to attempt to decide the extent to which, if any, prior patents would possibly battle with the brand new invention they had been hoping to guard. Then it might probably take many extra weeks to craft a patent utility with the correct arguments to attempt to overcome any objections from patent examiners. Securing a patent can take as much as 24 months.
Ankar needs to make use of massive language fashions to streamline that course of. As a result of these fashions can seek for phrasing that has the identical that means, even when it doesn’t use the very same key phrases, they’ll rapidly floor patent filings from databases that beforehand would have taken a number of searches and hours of studying to find.
The startup’s invention discovery instrument searches throughout 150 million patent functions and 250 million scientific publications and produces experiences assessing how “novel” an invention is and what claims have already been made by beforehand patented innovations that could be comparable (what’s identified within the patent world as “prior artwork.”) The platform helps inventors harvest their concepts and guides patent attorneys via drafting functions, together with recognizing gaps in current patents the place claims for a brand new invention would possibly get essentially the most traction. It additionally helps patent legal professionals after they have to reply to potential challenges from patent examiners, giving them a single view of the complete historical past of the applying course of.
“Patent claims are principally the scope of safety on your invention—like, what are an important items of my invention that I wish to defend? [Ankar’s] instrument will help recommend an preliminary set of claims after which assist the patent legal professional suppose via potential choices for broadening these claims,” Gharbi mentioned. “So it’s now not about simply serving to you sort of generate phrases, as a result of we expect that the worth of simply producing phrases goes to lower over time. It’s going to change into extra about like, how do I generate the perfect qualities of the scope of safety?”
The corporate has secured some notable early clients, together with world cosmetics big L’Oréal and world regulation agency Vorys. Ankar says that thus far its clients have reported a median 40% increase in productiveness, with tons of of hours shifted to high-value strategic work.
Jean-Yves Legendre, aggressive IP intelligence supervisor at L’Oréal, praised Ankar in an announcement, saying that the startup “understood patents, spoke our language, and tailored to our wants.”
Many world corporations, significantly in automotive, electronics, and R&D-heavy sector are redoubling efforts to guard their mental property, involved that generative AI will make it simpler for opponents to duplicate product designs, architectures, and processes. On the identical time, many corporations are desirous to file and defend their IP as a result of they wish to use it to coach or fine-tune their very own AI fashions to assist increase productiveness.
Ankar plans to make use of the brand new funding to double its present 20-person headcount and broaden its engineering, product, design, and go-to-market groups throughout Europe and the U.S.
