Two former Palantir employees hoping to use AI to transform the patent filing and management process have secured a $20 million investment in London-based startup Ankar.
Ankar's Series A funding round was led by venture capital firm Atomico, with participation from Index Ventures, Norsken, and Daphni. In May, the company announced a £3 million ($4 million) seed round led by Index, backed by Daphni and Motier Ventures.
Ankar was founded in 2024 by Tamar Gomez and Wiem Gharbi. The two met while working at Palantir, where they encountered the lengthy process of patenting new technology. Gomez, who has a business background, worked as a development strategist at Palantir, while Gharbi, a trained data scientist, worked on machine learning applications. They named their new company after an omniscient and powerful knight from pre-Islamic poetry.
“We are transforming IP, which has been considered a cost center for a very long time, into a strategic and competitive asset that is needed today in an increasingly competitive world,” said Ghabi, Ankar's chief technology officer. luck.
Ankar's new funding comes as intellectual property becomes increasingly important to company value. According to the World Intellectual Property Organization, intangible assets such as intellectual property now account for up to 90% of the value of S&P 500 companies. But the systems for protecting these assets remain stubbornly outdated, according to Gomez and Galbi, who said they saw first-hand how time-consuming and difficult it is to obtain patents while working at Palantir.
“It basically took years to turn something that was in the inventor's head, an innovation, into an asset that a company could leverage in the form of a patent,” said Gomez, CEO of Ankar. “The tools for that were either incredibly old or simply didn't exist. It was a hodgepodge of manual processes.”
Patent attorneys may spend weeks searching multiple databases and reading patent applications, trying to determine how likely any prior patents are to conflict with the new invention they want to protect. This can potentially add many more weeks to crafting a patent application with the right arguments to overcome objections from patent examiners. Obtaining a patent can take up to 24 months.
Ankar hopes to use large-scale language models to streamline that process. These models can search for words with the same meaning, even if they don't use the exact same keywords, allowing databases to quickly surface patent applications that previously required multiple searches and hours of viewing.
The startup's invention discovery tool searches 150 million patent applications and 250 million scientific publications and produces a report that assesses how “novel” an invention is and what claims are already made by potentially similar previously patented inventions (known in the patent world as “prior art”). The platform helps inventors gather ideas and guides patent attorneys through application drafting, including finding gaps in existing patents where new invention claims are most likely to gain traction. It also supports patent attorneys who must respond to objections from patent examiners and provides a single view of the entire history of the application process.
“A patent claim is basically the scope of protection for your invention. For example, 'What is the most important part of my invention that I want to protect?' [Ankar’s] “This tool helps propose an initial set of claims and helps patent attorneys consider potential options for extending those claims. So it's no longer just about helping people generate words, because we believe that the value of just generating words diminishes over time,” Ghabi said. It will become even more important to ask, “How can we produce the best quality within our protection?” ”
The company has secured some notable early customers, including global cosmetics giant L'Oréal and global law firm Vooris. So far, Ankar says its customers have reported an average 40% increase in productivity and hundreds of hours shifted to high-value, strategic work.
Jean-Yves Legendre, competitive intellectual property manager at L'Oréal, praised Anker in a statement, saying the startup “understands patents, speaks our language and has adapted to our needs.”
Many global companies, especially in automotive, electronics, and other R&D focus areas, are redoubling efforts to protect their intellectual property, worried that generative AI will make it easier for competitors to copy their product designs, architectures, and processes. At the same time, many companies are keen to record and protect their IP, as they want to use it to train and fine-tune their AI models to improve productivity.
Ankar plans to use the new funding to double its current headcount of 20 people and expand its engineering, product, design and go-to-market teams across Europe and the United States.
