Ankar Bags $20m For AI-Driven Patent Platform

Ankar, an AI-driven patent platform, has raised a $20m Series A round led by Atomico, with Index Ventures increasing its investment. It’s another sign that the IP world is being disrupted as a myriad of AI startups focused on patents come to market.

For example, just a week ago, Solve – another AI startup in this area – raised $40m, with Thomson Reuters investing again. See here. And that’s just one of many such companies raising fast, and also growing fast in this part of the market.

Ankar – which is based in London – will use the funding to grow its team and expand further into the US, they said. It also takes total funding to $24m. It has L’Oreal as a client already, as well as US law firm Vorys.

Nice, but, what does it do?

The platform ‘orchestrates how ideas become defensible IP globally’, it does this by ‘bringing novelty assessment, drafting and prosecution together’ so teams can do in hours what once took weeks.

So, for example it can:

• ‘Perform instant novelty and prior-art analysis across 150+ million patent applications and 250+ million scientific publications,
• turn invention disclosures into high-quality draft applications with strategic guidance on claim strength and scope,
• consolidate all history and analysis into a single view when examiners respond’.

Interestingly, co-founders Tamar Gomez and Wiem Gharbi previously built software at Palantir in Europe and the US.

They also reckon that Ankar is delivering an ‘average 40% boost in productivity and hundreds of hours shifted to high-value work’.

Gomez, co-founder, said: ’Invention is how we solve humanity’s biggest challenges, yet the systems that protect those ideas are decades out of date.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.’

Gharbi, fellow co-founder, added: ‘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.’

And Andreas Helbig, partner at Atomico, concluded: ‘Tamar and Wiem bring exceptional technical depth and first-hand experience of how broken the patent process is.’

You can find more about Ankar here.

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P.S. in other IP news, the Rouse Group, an international IP services business, has appointed Julia Hayhoe to Chair of the Group. In the past she was previously Chief Strategy Officer at Baker McKenzie.

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