Two former Palantir employees hoping to use AI to transform the patent filing and management process have secured a $20 million investment for their London-based startup, Ankar.
The Series A funding round for Ankar was led by venture capital firm Atomico, with participation from Index Ventures, Norrsken and Daphni. The company had announced an investment of £3 million ($4 million) round of seeds in May, this was led by Index, with support from Daphni and Motier Ventures.
Ankar was founded by Tamar Gomez and Wiem Gharbi in 2024. The two met while working at Palantir, where they both faced the tedious process of trying to obtain patents for new technology. Gomez, who has a business background, worked as a development strategist for Palantir, while Gharbi, who is a data scientist by training, worked on machine learning applications. They named their new venture after an all-knowing and powerful knight found in pre-Islamic poetry.
“We are trying to transform intellectual property, considered a cost center for a very long time, into a strategic and competitive asset that we need today in a world that is becoming more and more competitive,” said Gharbi, Ankar’s chief technology officer. Fortune.
Ankar’s new funding comes as intellectual property has become increasingly critical to business value. Intangible assets like intellectual property now account for up to 90% of the value of S&P 500 companies, according to the World Intellectual Property Organization. Yet the systems for protecting these assets remain stubbornly outdated, according to Gomez and Gharbi, who say they saw how long and difficult it is to obtain a patent when they worked at Palantir.
“Going from something that is in the inventor’s head – an innovation – to something that is a bankable asset that can be leveraged by the company in the form of a patent took years, basically,” said Gomez, Ankar’s CEO. “The tools to do this were incredibly old or just non-existent. It was like a hodgepodge of manual processes.”
Patent attorneys can spend weeks searching multiple databases and reading patent filings to try to determine to what extent, if any, prior patents might conflict with the new invention they were hoping to protect. Then it can take several more weeks to draft a patent application with the right arguments to try to overcome the patent examiners’ objections. Obtaining a patent can take up to 24 months.
Ankar wants to use large language models to streamline this process. Because these models can search for phrases with the same meaning, even if they don’t use the exact same keywords, they can quickly surface patent filings from databases that previously would have required multiple searches and hours of reading to discover.
The startup’s invention discovery tool searches through 150 million patent applications and 250 million scientific publications and produces reports assessing how “new” an invention is and what claims have already been made by previously patented inventions that might be similar (what in the patent world is known as “prior art”). It also helps patent attorneys when they need to respond to possible challenges from patent examiners, by giving them a single view of the complete history of the application process.
“Patent claims are essentially about the scope of protection for your invention, for example: “What are the most important parts of my invention that I want to protect?” “(Ankar’s) tool can help suggest an initial set of claims and then help the patent attorney think through potential options for expanding those claims,” Gharbi said. “So it’s no longer just about helping you generate words, because we think the value of just generating words is going to diminish over time. It’s going to be more about asking, ‘How can I generate the best qualities of the scope of protection?'”
The company has gained some notable early clients, including global cosmetics giant L’Oréal and international law firm Vorys. Ankar says that so far its clients have reported an average 40% increase in productivity, with hundreds of hours spent on high-value, strategic work.
Jean-Yves Legendre, head of intellectual property competitive intelligence at L’Oréal, praised Ankar in a statement, saying the startup “understood patents, spoke our language and adapted to our needs.”
Many global companies, particularly in the automotive, electronics and other R&D-intensive industries, are doubling down on efforts to protect their intellectual property, fearing that generative AI will make it easier for competitors to replicate product designs, architectures and processes. At the same time, many companies are keen to register and protect their intellectual property because they want to use it to train or refine their own AI models to help increase productivity.
Ankar plans to use the new funding to double its current headcount of 20 and expand its engineering, product, design and marketing teams in Europe and the United States.