Full-Time
Account Executive
Ankar AI
51-200 employees
Streamlines IP search, drafting, and FTO
No salary listed
London, UK
Hybrid
Three days on-site per week required in the Shoreditch office.
 Sales & Account Management (1) |
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- At least 5 years of experience in business-to-business software-as-a-service go-to-market and sales.
- A track record of consistently exceeding revenue targets.
- Ability to run the full sales cycle, from prospecting and discovery to demonstrations, negotiations, and closing.
- Ability to proactively generate pipeline, find creative ways to reach customers, and persistently move deals forward.
- Ability to approach problems critically and consistently look for ways to improve.
- Drive the end-to-end sales process, including prospecting, discovery, demonstrations, solution positioning, negotiation, and closing deals with annual contract values of $50,000 to $100,000 or more.
- Execute the go-to-market strategy by applying messaging, ideal customer profiles, and the sales playbook in conversations with prospects.
- Build and manage a strong pipeline through outbound and inbound sales and industry events.
- Deliver presentations, proposals, and reports tailored to customer needs.
- Partner with the Head of Sales to refine sales processes, share market insights, and contribute to a culture of learning and improvement.
- Collaborate with marketing, product, and engineering to provide feedback and influence the product roadmap and go-to-market initiatives.
- Build trusted, long-term relationships with prospects and customers.
- Experience with enterprise or mid-market deals.
- Experience working in early-stage startups, commercializing artificial intelligence or intellectual-property-related products, or selling to law firms, patent attorneys, or in-house intellectual property professionals.
- A strong existing network in enterprise innovation, research and development, or intellectual property teams.
Ankar AI provides an AI-powered platform for end-to-end IP lifecycle management, helping inventors, R&D teams, and legal professionals search prior art, draft and file patents, perform Freedom-to-Operate (FTO) analyses, and detect infringements. It leverages large language models and related AI tools to assist users within a unified workspace, improving efficiency and thoroughness across IP tasks. Unlike tools that focus on individual tasks, Ankar AI combines multiple core IP functions into one integrated platform designed for the full lifecycle. Its goal is to shift IP work from manual, fragmented processes to collaborative, AI-assisted workflows that speed up innovation while maintaining accuracy.
Company Size
51-200
Company Stage
Series A
Total Funding
$24M
Headquarters
London, United Kingdom
Founded
2024
Get referred to Ankar AI
See people who can refer or advise you
Simplify's Take
What believers are saying
- 2026-06-23: Ankar hired Harm van der Heijden, strengthening product credibility with practitioners.
- Atomico-led $20M Series A funded expansion into the US and engineering hiring.
- L'Oréal and Vorys validate demand; Ankar reports 40% productivity gains and strong referrals.
What critics are saying
- Solve Intelligence raised $40M in 2025 and serves 700+ IP teams by 2026.
- Clarivate and PatSnap own incumbent IP budgets, making enterprise displacement brutally slow.
- If Word-native drafting becomes commoditized, Ankar loses pricing power before US expansion.
What makes Ankar AI unique
- 2026-06-23: Harm van der Heijden joins, giving Ankar in-house patent expertise.
- Ankar ties prior art, drafting, prosecution, and infringement detection into one workflow.
- Native Word round-tripping preserves law-firm review habits while adding AI automation.
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Benefits
Health Insurance
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Meal Benefits
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Hybrid Work Options
Growth & Insights and Company News
6 month growth
↑ 33%1 year growth
↑ 33%2 year growth
↑ 62%Enhanced drafting in Ankar with native Word compatibility. Wiem Gharbi Co-founder Today, Ankar AI Ltd is introducing a completely redesigned editing experience in Ankar for seamless compatibility with Word, further enhancing its existing suite of advanced document editing capabilities. High-fidelity Word compatibility For patent professionals, Microsoft Word documents are the standard for exchanging patent work products. Applications are reviewed by partners, shared with clients, exchanged with foreign associates and prepared for filing as .docx documents. That's why Ankar AI Ltd has built its editor to work naturally with the Microsoft Word (.docx) format, while providing a familiar editing experience inside Ankar. The editor supports: * High-fidelity Word rendering * Firm letterheads and document templates * Custom styles * Extended formatting, including font families, font sizes and line spacing * Headers and footers Whether you're opening an existing application or drafting a new one, your documents retain the formatting your colleagues and clients expect. Round-trip Word editing Import an existing .docx file into Ankar, continue drafting with AI, and export it back to Microsoft Word with comments and tracked changes preserved. Teams can adopt AI without changing the review workflows they already rely on. Edits made inside Ankar remain fully reviewable, allowing attorneys, partners and clients to collaborate exactly as they do today, with AI acting as an assistant throughout the drafting process instead of introducing a separate workflow. Go beyond Word where it matters Word compatibility means patent teams don't have to choose between existing workflows and more powerful ways to draft. Inside Ankar, you can build on the AI-powered workflows that are already accelerating many patent professionals' daily work, including: Plan mode: Define the draft's sections, iterate on the plan, then write with AI. Sequence Citations: Cite sequences using live references that link directly to their corresponding sequence entries. References update automatically whenever the sequence listing changes, ensuring citations remain accurate and consistent. This redesigned editing experience reflects a simple principle: adopting AI shouldn't require changing the way patent teams already work. By combining high-fidelity Word compatibility with AI-native drafting, review and citation workflows, Ankar lets firms keep the document formats, templates and review processes they already use while benefiting from a fundamentally more capable drafting experience.
Ankar hires senior patent partner as Head of Patent Innovation. 22 hours ago 0 Ankar has appointed Harm van der Heijden as its first Head of Patent Innovation, marking a significant step in the company's mission to redefine how patent and innovation professionals work with AI. Van der Heijden joins Ankar after nearly two decades in private practice, where he built a reputation as one of the industry's most forward-thinking voices on the practical use of technology in patent prosecution. In his new role, he will work closely with Ankar's product and engineering teams to identify emerging practitioner needs, improve workflows, and help shape the next generation of AI-powered patent tools. The appointment reflects a broader shift taking place across the intellectual property profession. As AI moves from experimentation to everyday practice, experienced practitioners are increasingly looking beyond traditional career paths and toward opportunities to help build the technologies that will define the future of the profession. "Patent attorneys are entering a new era," said van der Heijden. "For a long time, the profession had two main destinations: private practice or in-house. Today there's a third option emergin - helping create the tools that practitioners themselves rely on." Before entering the patent profession, van der Heijden earned a PhD in computational physics and worked as a researcher, developer, and systems architect. While building a successful career in intellectual property, he maintained a deep interest in software development and process innovation, creating internal tools and exploring ways to improve how patent work is performed. That combination of technical and legal experience made the opportunity at Ankar particularly compelling. "I was fortunate enough to witness the rise of the internet firsthand," he said. "AI feels even more transformative. I didn't want to watch this change from the sidelines. I wanted to help build it." Van der Heijden believes AI's greatest impact on patent practice will not simply be efficiency gains, but allowing attorneys to spend more time on the highest-value parts of their work. "AI is exceptionally good at reading large volumes of material, organizing information, and executing repetitive drafting tasks," he said. "What it doesn't do well is strategy, judgment, or solving difficult legal problems. That's where experienced attorneys add value." According to van der Heijden, the most successful firms will be those that learn how to combine both strengths. By automating routine work, attorneys can focus more deeply on claim strategy, invention analysis, office action responses, and client counseling. One area that particularly impressed him about Ankar's approach was its focus on traceability and source verification. "Patent attorneys need to understand where information comes from," he said. "If AI produces an answer, you need to be able to verify it quickly. Being able to trace outputs directly back to source material makes a world of difference." At Ankar, van der Heijden will serve as a bridge between practitioners and product teams, helping ensure that new capabilities solve real-world problems and fit naturally into existing workflows. As adoption of AI accelerates across the profession, van der Heijden believes the question is no longer whether patent attorneys will use AI, but how effectively they will integrate it into their practice. "The firms that understand where AI adds value, and where human expertise remains essential, will be best positioned for the future," he said. "That's the future we're helping build at Ankar."
Palantir veterans' startup Ankar raises €17 million to expand AI-driven IP software into the US. Ankar, a London-based AI platform innovating how companies and law firms capture and protect their patents, has raised a €17 million ($20 million) Series A round to grow its team and expand further into the US. The round was led by Atomico, with Index Ventures doubling down and Norrsken VC and Daphni participating - bringing total funding to €20 million ($24 million). Tamar Gomez, co-founder of Ankar AI, says: "Invention is how we solve humanity's biggest challenges, yet the systems that protect those ideas are decades out of date. AI will redefine how global organisations innovate over the next five years, turning IP from a cost centre into a growth driver. The companies that adopt Ankar now will shape the future of innovation." In 2025, EU-Startups reporting points to steady funding activity across AI-driven LegalTech and IP-adjacent software in Europe. Alongside Ankar's Series A, Madrid-based iPNOTE raised a €857k Seed round to scale its AI-powered platform aimed at reducing and managing intellectual property costs for companies. Amsterdam-headquartered Saga secured over €1.5 million to expand its lawyer-centric AI platform for legal professionals across Europe and Latin America, while Copenhagen-based Pandektes closed a €2.9 million Seed round to automate legal research and navigation of European legislation. In the UK, London-based Augmetec raised over €2.4 million to further develop its AI-enabled legal workflow platform. Taken together, these 2025 funding announcements represent approximately €24.7 million in disclosed capital flowing into AI-enabled legal and IP software when combined with Ankar's Series A. Most comparable companies covered by EU-Startups this year remain at Seed stage, positioning Ankar's round at the larger end of the funding spectrum for the sector in 2025. While none of the directly comparable IP-focused startups reported this year are UK-based, activity across Spain, the Netherlands, Denmark and the UK indicates geographically distributed investor interest in applying AI to legal and intellectual property workflows. Wiem Gharbi, co-founder of Ankar AI, adds: "Patents sit at the intersection of deep technical knowledge and precise legal reasoning, and AI can finally unlock real leverage in that process. Ankar gives professionals the analytical depth they've never had before, enabling stronger strategy and better protection. Atomico shares our ambition to build the infrastructure behind the next generation of global innovation." Invention is how humanity's biggest challenges are solved, and AI is fundamentally changing how inventions become protected assets. It enables patent teams to analyse novelty, draft claims and evaluate prior art with unprecedented depth and speed. Yet, Ankar says fragmented tools, gaps in AI trust, and slow enterprise adoption have held organisations back. The company looks to solve these challenges with an OS that unifies the entire patent lifecycle into one secure workflow. Founded in 2023 by former Palantir leaders Wiem Gharbi and Tamar Gomez, Ankar AI gives patent and R&D teams the tools to innovate a range of tasks from invention capture to patent drafting and analysis with LLM-powered software. Its platform orchestrates how ideas become defensible IP globally, bringing novelty assessment, drafting and prosecution together so teams can do in "hours what once took weeks". Ankar explains that patents can take up to 24 months to secure and still rely on scattered Word documents, spreadsheets, emails and outdated IP systems. This inefficiency slows teams down and discourages inventors from filing altogether. Ankar aims to replace this fragmented process with a unified platform that supports the entire patent lifecycle. It performs instant novelty and prior-art analysis across 150+ million patent applications and 250+ million scientific publications, turns invention disclosures into draft applications with strategic guidance on claim strength and scope, and consolidates all history and analysis into a single view when examiners respond. Andreas Helbig, partner at Atomico, says: "Tamar and Wiem bring exceptional technical depth and first-hand experience of how broken the patent process is. Their momentum with Fortune 500 companies shows they're building the right product at exactly the right moment. We're proud to support their mission as they build the foundational infrastructure for how the world's most important ideas are protected and commercialised." According to data provided by the company, their platform delivers an average 40% boost in productivity, with 96% of users saying they would recommend the platform to colleagues. This is notable, as figures show that intangible assets such as IP now make up to 90% of the value of S&P 500 companies, yet patent professionals still spend around half of their time on manual, administrative work. This new capital will be used to double the company's 20-person team, expand engineering, product and design, and grow Ankar's go-to-market organisation to support rising demand across Europe and the US. The long-term ambition is to become the software layer that orchestrates how ideas turn into defensible patents globally, which the company believes will be the core infrastructure of innovation in the AI era. Jean-Yves Legendre, Competitive IP Intelligence Manager at L'Oréal, adds: "Most vendors came with a fixed solution. With Ankar, they began with our needs. They understood patents, spoke our language, and adapted to our needs by configuring their existing technology into a solution that fits our reality."
Exclusive: Ankar, which uses AI to streamline patent filing, secures $20 million Series A funding. Two former Palantir employees hoping to use AI to transform the process for filing and managing patents have secured $20 million in investment for their London-based startup, Ankar. The Series A funding round for Ankar was led by venture capital firm Atomico, with participation from Index Ventures, Norrsken, and Daphni. The company had announced a £3 million ($4 million) seed round in May that was led by Index, with support from Daphni and Motier Ventures. Ankar was founded by Tamar Gomez and Wiem Gharbi in 2024. The pair met while working at Palantir, where they both encountered the time-consuming process of trying to obtain patents for new technology. Gomez, who has a business background, worked as a development strategist for Palantir, while Gharbi, who is a data scientist by training, worked on machine learning applications. They took the name Ankar for their new company from the name of an omniscient and powerful knight found 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 is Ankar's chief technology officer, told Fortune. The new funding for Ankar comes as intellectual property has become increasingly critical to corporate value. Intangible assets like IP now represent up to 90% of the value of S&P 500 companies, according to the World Intellectual Property Organization. Yet the systems for protecting those assets remain stubbornly outdated, according to Gomez and Gharbi, who say they witnessed how time-consuming and difficult it is to obtain a patent when they were 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 is Ankar's CEO, said. "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 searching multiple databases and reading patent filings to try to determine the extent to which, if any, prior patents might conflict with the new invention they were hoping to protect. Then it can take many more weeks to craft a patent application with the right arguments to try to overcome any objections from patent examiners. Securing a patent can take up to 24 months. Ankar wants to use large language models to streamline that process. Because these models can search for phrasing that has the same meaning, even if it doesn't use the exact same keywords, they can quickly surface patent filings from databases that previously would have taken multiple searches and hours of reading to discover. The startup's invention discovery tool searches across 150 million patent applications and 250 million scientific publications and produces reports assessing how "novel" an invention is and what claims have already been made by previously patented inventions that might be similar (what's known in the patent world as "prior art.") The platform helps inventors harvest their ideas and guides patent attorneys through drafting applications, including spotting gaps in existing patents where claims for a new invention might get the most traction. It also supports patent lawyers when they have to respond to possible challenges from patent examiners, giving them a single view of the entire history of the application process. "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 said. "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 company has secured some notable early customers, including global cosmetics giant L'Oréal and global law firm Vorys. Ankar says that so far its customers have reported an average 40% boost in productivity, with hundreds of hours shifted to high-value strategic work. Jean-Yves Legendre, competitive IP intelligence manager at L'Oréal, praised Ankar in a statement, saying that the startup "understood patents, spoke our language, and adapted to our needs." Many global companies, particularly in automotive, electronics, and R&D-heavy sector are redoubling efforts to protect their intellectual property, concerned that generative AI will make it easier for competitors to replicate product designs, architectures, and processes. At the same time, many companies are eager to record and protect their IP because they want to use it to train or fine-tune their own AI models to help boost productivity. Ankar plans to use the new funding to double its current 20-person headcount and expand its engineering, product, design, and go-to-market teams across Europe and the U.S.
Ankar, a London-based startup founded by former Palantir employees Tamar Gomez and Wiem Gharbi, has raised $20 million in Series A funding led by Atomico, with participation from Index Ventures, Norrsken and Daphni. The company had previously raised £3 million in seed funding in May. Founded in 2024, Ankar uses large language models to streamline patent filing and management, searching across 150 million patent applications and 250 million scientific publications. The platform helps patent attorneys identify prior art, draft applications and respond to patent examiner challenges, reportedly boosting productivity by 40% amongst early customers. The company has secured clients including L'Oréal and law firm Vorys. Ankar plans to use the funding to double its 20-person team and expand across Europe and the US.