Two former Palantir staff hoping to make use of AI to remodel the method for submitting and managing patents have secured $20 million in funding for his or her London-based startup, Ankar.
The Collection 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 technique of making an attempt to acquire patents for brand new expertise. Gomez, who has a enterprise background, labored as a growth strategist for Palantir, whereas Gharbi, who’s an information scientist by coaching, labored on machine studying functions. They took the identify Ankar for his or her new firm from the identify of an omniscient and highly effective knight present in pre-Islamic poetry.
“We are trying to turn IP that has been viewed as a cost center for a very long time into more of a strategic and competitive asset that we need today in a world that is becoming more and more competitive,” Gharbi, who’s Ankar’s chief expertise officer, advised Fortune.
The brand new funding for Ankar comes as mental property has turn into more and more crucial to company worth. Intangible property like IP now signify as much as 90% of the worth of S&P 500 corporations, in response to the World Mental Property Group. But the techniques for shielding these property stay stubbornly outdated, in response to Gomez and Gharbi, who say they witnessed how time-consuming and tough it’s to acquire a patent once they have been working at Palantir.
“To go from something that’s in the head of the inventor—an innovation—to something that is a bankable asset that can be leveraged by the company in the form of a patent took years, basically,” Gomez, who’s Ankar’s CEO, stated. “The tools to do so were incredibly legacy or just non-existent. It was like a hodgepodge of manual 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 may battle with the brand new invention they have been hoping to guard. Then it may possibly take many extra weeks to craft a patent software with the best arguments to attempt to overcome any objections from patent examiners. Securing a patent can take as much as 24 months.
Ankar desires to make use of giant language fashions to streamline that course of. As a result of these fashions can seek for phrasing that has the identical which 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 is perhaps related (what’s recognized within the patent world as “prior art.”) The platform helps inventors harvest their concepts and guides patent attorneys by means of drafting functions, together with recognizing gaps in current patents the place claims for a brand new invention may get essentially the most traction. It additionally helps patent legal professionals once they have to answer attainable challenges from patent examiners, giving them a single view of your entire historical past of the applying course of.
“Patent claims are basically the scope of protection for your invention—like, what are the most important pieces of my invention that I want to protect? [Ankar’s] tool can help suggest an initial set of claims and then help the patent attorney think through potential options for broadening these claims,” Gharbi stated. “So it’s no longer about just helping you kind of generate words, because we think that the value of just generating words is going to decrease over time. It’s going to become more about like, how do I generate the best qualities of the scope of protection?”
The corporate has secured some notable early clients, together with international cosmetics big L’Oréal and international legislation agency Vorys. Ankar says that up to now its clients have reported a median 40% increase in productiveness, with a whole bunch 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 adapted to our needs.”
Many international corporations, notably 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 rivals to copy product designs, architectures, and processes. On the similar time, many corporations are wanting to report and shield 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.
