Traditional law firms face new competition. Stilta, an AI-powered patent research platform, just announced a $10.5 million seed round led by Andreessen Horowitz, with Y Combinator and operators from OpenAI, Legora, and Lovable also investing. Silicon Valley's largest venture firms have bet on automating work that patent attorneys have performed for decades.
CEO Oskar Block, an entrepreneur since age 18, identified the opportunity after an autonomous trucking company struggled with patent work. Over dinner, his co-founder's father, a patent attorney, described the reality: "Reading the same kind of documents, the same way he had for thirty years." Block and his team saw an opening.
Stilta's process is straightforward: users input a patent number, and a network of AI agents analyzes the data like a team of specialist lawyers would. They identify conflicting patents, flag similar property, pull filing histories, and generate litigation-grade reports with specific citations. "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.
Block noted that many companies hold patents they have "never enforced, never licensed, never even analyzed properly because the cost of doing so was prohibitive." Stilta lowers that cost and potentially unlocks millions in untapped IP value.
Legal tech funding is accelerating. Competitors like Solve Intelligence and DeepIP operate in the space, but Stilta has investor backing, founders with AI experience, and a platform that could change how enterprises manage intellectual property.
