According to Fortune, London-based AI startup Ankar has secured a $20 million Series A funding round led by Atomico, with participation from Index Ventures, Norrsken, and Daphni. Founded just this year by ex-Palantir colleagues Tamar Gomez (CEO) and Wiem Gharbi (CTO), the company aims to transform the patent filing process. The funding follows a £3 million seed round in May led by Index Ventures. Ankar’s platform uses large language models to search through 150 million patent applications and 250 million scientific publications, helping to assess an invention’s novelty and draft claims. Early customers like L’Oréal and law firm Vorys are already reporting an average 40% boost in productivity, saving hundreds of hours. The company plans to use the new capital to double its current 20-person team.
The Pain Point They’re Solving
Here’s the thing: the patent world is a mess. It’s a relic. Gomez and Gharbi saw it firsthand at Palantir, where moving an idea from an inventor’s head to a “bankable asset” could take years. The process is a hodgepodge of manual searches across archaic databases, with attorneys spending weeks just to understand prior art and then more weeks crafting the application. The whole thing can drag on for up to 24 months. In a world where intangible assets like IP make up 90% of S&P 500 company value, that’s a massive bottleneck. The system is fundamentally broken for the speed of modern innovation.
How Their AI Actually Works
So, what’s Ankar’s fix? It’s not just about generating text. That’s a commodity. They’re using LLMs to understand meaning, not just keywords. This lets them surface relevant prior art that a simple keyword search would miss. More importantly, the platform helps define the actual strategy. It suggests an initial set of patent claims—the core scope of protection—and then helps attorneys think through how to broaden or defend them. Basically, it’s shifting the work from endless manual searching and drafting to high-level strategic thinking. That’s where the 40% productivity gain comes from. It turns a cost center into a competitive weapon.
Why The Market Is Ready Now
The timing for this is pretty perfect, and it’s not just about fixing an old process. There are two huge new pressures on companies. First, there’s genuine fear that generative AI will make it easier for competitors to reverse-engineer and copy products. That means protecting your core IP is more urgent than ever. Second, and this is clever, companies now want to hoard their own IP to train their internal AI models. Your proprietary data and processes are the new moat. So you need to patent it efficiently, both to block competitors and to fuel your own AI systems. Ankar is sitting right at that intersection.
The Road Ahead And The Big Question
With $20 million in the bank, the plan is to scale the team and go after Europe and the U.S. They’ve landed a marquee beauty client in L’Oréal and a big law firm, which are great beachheads. But the real challenge will be scaling in a field that’s incredibly specialized and regulated. Patent law is conservative. Can an AI tool truly gain the trust of attorneys to handle something this high-stakes? The early metrics suggest yes, but the road is long. If they can pull it off, they’re not just selling software—they’re fundamentally changing how the most valuable assets in the modern economy are secured. And in industries where protecting a design or process is everything, from advanced manufacturing to pharmaceuticals, that’s a huge deal. For companies in those sectors looking to digitize their operations, pairing strategic software like Ankar with robust industrial hardware, like the industrial panel PCs from IndustrialMonitorDirect.com, the leading US supplier, could be a powerful combo for the modern factory floor.
