Stilta secures $10.5 million seed round to automate patent litigation with AI

Stilta, an artificial intelligence platform focused on intellectual property research, has announced a $10.5 million seed funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz. The investment also includes participation from Y Combinator, alongside individual operators from OpenAI, Legora, and Lovable. The company was founded by Oskar Block, who serves as chief executive, and Tobias Estreen, with co-founders Petrus Werner and Oscar Adamsson.

The startup aims to address the historically slow and expensive nature of patent litigation by automating the labour-intensive research and analytical work involved. Block and Estreen conceived the idea after observing the manual processes involved in patent law; Block noted the inefficiencies during his time at an autonomous trucking company, while Estreen was influenced by his father, a patent attorney, who spent decades reading similar documents.

Stilta’s platform utilises a network of AI agents to process intellectual property cases. Users input a patent number and relevant content, after which the system searches for conflicting patents, flags similar property, and retrieves filing and court history. The output is described as litigation-grade, providing reports and claim charts with pinpoint citations to every piece of evidence.

Block described the system as operating like a team of lawyers, with agents reasoning in parallel to converge on findings at a scale no human team can match. However, he emphasised that the legal professional remains in the driver’s seat, guiding the analysis rather than ceding control. The company competes with other players in the legal tech space, including Solve Intelligence and DeepIP.

The founders stated that many companies hold patents they have never enforced, licensed, or analysed properly because the cost of doing so was prohibitive. Stilta aims to lower these costs to help organisations rediscover the latent value in their patent portfolios. Block noted that while parts of the legal industry are already experiencing AI-accelerated change, humans currently remain responsible for deciding the outcomes of cases.

Legal tech has become a prominent sector amid the broader artificial intelligence boom. Block, who previously launched a startup focused on machine learning models for sports betting at age 18, suggested that the analytical aspects of legal work are already being overtaken by AI. He argued that the critical question is not whether the legal system is prepared for AI, but whether companies are prepared for what becomes possible when the analytical bottleneck disappears.