Ankar, a platform leveraging AI agents for IP matters, has raised a £3m ($4.05m) Seed round led by Index Ventures. Hugging Face’s CTO, Julien Chaumond, also joined the round.
The company was founded last year by Palantir alumni Tamar Gomez and Wiem Gharbi. They explained that Ankar can help inventors, companies, and their IP lawyers gain major efficiency improvements ‘first by identifying patent gaps and assessing an invention’s originality, then drafting patent submissions with enhanced uniqueness and defensibility, and finally detecting infringements at scale while identifying new licensing opportunities’.
This, they add, then provides ‘significant reductions in IP costs and unlocking new revenue streams through IP monetisation and commercialisation of new discoveries’.
So, for example when it comes to patentability checking, it works like this:
‘Simply upload an invention disclosure and allow Ankar to evaluate its patentability against 150m existing patents – in a matter of seconds
Receive a patentability score for how likely a patent is to be granted.
Drill down into similar prior art Ankar has identified as high risk.
Automatically generate claims for each facet of the patent – including methods and sub-products.
Submit your patent for review.
Launchpad analyzes your invention disclosure, identifies the aspects of it that stand apart, and suggests ways to tweak the design to make it truly unique.’
And it also does plenty more, as noted above.
Tamar Gomez, co-founder of Ankar, commented: ‘As AI becomes more deeply integrated with the invention process, we’re about to witness an explosion in the rate of discovery. Ankar is positioning itself at the centre of this transformation by building the operating system of innovation.’
Hannah Seal, Partner at Index Ventures, added: ‘Tamar and Wiem are redefining how innovation is captured, protected, and commercialized – turning IP from a defensive legal asset into a strategic growth lever. As innovation and R&D lie at the heart of economic growth and progress more broadly, we’re excited to back Ankar on their mission to empower more teams to turn bold ideas into lasting outcomes.’
Also joining the Seed round were Daphni, Motier Ventures, Booom and Puzzle Ventures, as well as leading angels, including Datadog CEO, Olivier Pomel.
Is this a big deal?
As explored by AL over recent months, the IP field is being shaken up by genAI. A growing number of startups that see the opportunity to wield LLM-based language understanding – and multi-modal perception – to provide patent lawyers with major advances in work efficiency and research improvement, are seizing the moment to build out across the sector.
How Ankar compares to others now in the field remains to be seen, but with £3m in their back pocket they’ve got some useful fuel. They also are taking a broad approach and will market as a platform, rather than handling one narrow aspect of patent work.
How things play out for the various IP startups will become clearer in the next 18 months, but one thing is for sure: patent work will never be the same again because of genAI. Good luck to them.
You can find more about Ankar here.
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Legal Innovators California conference, San Francisco, June 11 + 12
If you’re interested in the cutting edge of legal AI and innovation – and where we are all heading – then come along to Legal Innovators California, in San Francisco, June 11 and 12, where speakers from the leading law firms, inhouse teams, and tech companies will be sharing their insights and experiences as to what is really happening.
We already have an incredible roster of companies to hear from. This includes: &AI, Legora, Harvey, StructureFlow, Ivo, Flatiron Law Group, PointOne, Centari, LexisNexis, eBrevia, Legatics, Knowable, Draftwise, newcode.AI, Riskaway, Aracor, SimpleClosure and more.
Cooley, Wilson Sonsini, Baker McKenzie, Gunderson, Ropes & Grey, A&O Shearman and many other leading law firms will also be taking part.
See you all there!
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