Two former McKinsey associates have raised $10.5 million for Stilta, a startup using AI to help businesses detect and fight patent violations. Founded in January, the company secured seed funding led by Andreessen Horowitz, with participation from Y Combinator and employees from OpenAI and other AI firms. Stilta's software breaks down patent analysis into tasks that AI agents handle in parallel. The system searches patents, academic papers, and other sources for evidence, then maps findings to specific patent claims whilst lawyers maintain control over strategic decisions. The company serves law firms and corporate legal departments, with clients including Roche and Maersk. Co-founder Oskar Block said 60% of revenue comes from law firms, whilst 40% comes from in-house legal teams. Stilta competes in the growing legal tech space alongside companies like Patlytics and DeepIP.

Stilta secures $10.5M from Andreessen Horowitz and Y Combinator to uncover overlooked corporate patents. Stilta has raised $10.5 million from Andreessen Horowitz and Y Combinator to help businesses identify, manage, and unlock value from forgotten patent assets. May 21, 2026 - 19:23 Entrepreneurship has been a recurring theme throughout Oskar Block's career, who says he has consistently been drawn to solving complex problems through technology and data-driven innovation. Block launched his first startup at 18, creating machine learning models for sports betting applications. Looking back on that experience, he said he has always enjoyed tackling difficult data challenges and building systems that extract meaningful insights from large volumes of information. After his initial entrepreneurial venture, Block moved into consulting, where he worked with businesses on strategies to adopt and integrate artificial intelligence. During that period, he gained firsthand experience helping major organisations understand how AI could fit into their operations and what was required to encourage large enterprises to embrace emerging technologies. Later, Block joined an autonomous trucking company. While working there, he became familiar with the patent process and observed how much of the work remained highly manual, time-consuming, and dependent on traditional research methods. The experience planted the seeds for what would eventually become his next startup. The idea took shape during a dinner conversation with a friend and colleague, Tobias Estreen. During the discussion, Estreen's father, who works as a patent attorney, described the repetitive nature of his daily responsibilities. According to Block, much of the work involved reviewing similar documents and performing the same research processes that had remained largely unchanged for decades. Recognising an opportunity to modernise the field, Block and Estreen partnered with Petrus Werner and Oscar Adamsson to establish Stilta. The company has developed an artificial intelligence platform focused on automating much of the research and analysis associated with intellectual property matters, an area traditionally known for requiring significant time, expertise, and labour. On Tuesday, the startup announced that it had secured $10.5 million in seed funding. The investment round was led by Andreessen Horowitz and included participation from Y Combinator, as well as operators and executives associated with companies such as OpenAI, Legora, and Lovable. Block, who serves as Stilta's chief executive officer, explained that the platform is designed to function like a coordinated team of legal professionals working on a patent case. Users begin by entering a patent number into the system and uploading any relevant supporting information. From there, a collection of specialised AI agents performs a wide range of research tasks. According to Block, the software searches for potentially conflicting patents, identifies related intellectual property relevant to a case, reviews patent filings, and gathers historical court records for the patent under examination. The goal is to streamline a process that has historically required extensive manual effort from attorneys and legal researchers. "They reason in parallel and converge the way a room full of specialists would, but at a scale no human team can match," Block said while describing how the platform operates. He emphasised that legal professionals remain actively involved throughout the process and continue to direct the analysis rather than relinquish control to the software. "The output is litigation-grade: a report and claim charts with pinpoint citations to every piece of evidence," he added. Stilta enters a growing market that already includes companies such as Solve Intelligence and DeepIP, both of which are developing artificial intelligence tools for intellectual property professionals. The legal technology sector has attracted increasing investor attention as advances in AI continue to create opportunities for automation across professional services industries. Block believes the legal profession is experiencing different levels of AI adoption depending on the type of work involved. Certain functions, particularly research-heavy and analytical tasks, are already undergoing significant transformation through automation. Other areas of the legal system, however, may take considerably longer to adapt to the technology. In his view, analytical work is among the legal functions most susceptible to AI-driven disruption. While artificial intelligence can increasingly assist with gathering evidence, identifying relevant information, and conducting legal analysis, human professionals remain responsible for making final judgments and determining case outcomes. Block also pointed to a broader issue affecting many organisations that possess extensive patent portfolios. Numerous companies, he said, own patents that have never been actively enforced, licensed, or thoroughly analysed because such evaluations have historically been too expensive and resource-intensive. As a result, potentially valuable intellectual property often remains unused despite representing a significant asset on a company's balance sheet. Block believes reducing the cost and complexity of patent analysis could encourage businesses to examine those assets more closely and identify new opportunities for monetisation, licensing, or legal enforcement. Addressing that challenge is central to Stilta's strategy. By making patent litigation research and intellectual property analysis faster, more efficient, and more affordable, the company aims to help organisations unlock value from patents that may have remained dormant for years. The broader impact, according to Block, could extend beyond legal departments and influence how businesses think about intellectual property altogether. If analytical barriers are significantly reduced through artificial intelligence, companies may gain a much clearer understanding of the assets they already possess and the opportunities those assets create. "The question isn't really whether the legal system is prepared for AI," Block said. "It's whether companies are prepared for what becomes possible when the analytical bottleneck disappears." With fresh funding from prominent investors and growing interest in AI-powered legal technology, Stilta is helping organisations uncover overlooked opportunities in their patent portfolios and transform one of the most labour-intensive areas of intellectual property work.