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Two former Palantir employees who hope to use AI to revolutionize the process of filing and managing patents have secured $20 million in investment for their London-based startup, ANCHOR.
The Series A funding round for Ankar was led by venture capital firm Atomico, with participation from Index Ventures, Norrsken, and Daphni. The company announced a £3 million ($4 million) round seed in May led by Index, with support from Daphni and Motier Ventures.
Ankar was founded by Tamar Gomez and Wiem Gharbi in 2024. The pair met while working at Palantir, where they both encountered the time-consuming process of trying to obtain patents for new technology. Gomez, who has a business background, works as a development strategist for Palantir, while Gharbi, who is a data scientist by training, works on machine learning applications. They took the name Ankar for their new company from the name of an omniscient and powerful knight found in pre-Islamic poetry.
“We’re trying to turn IP, which has been considered a cost center for a long time, into more of a strategic and competitive asset that we need today in a world that’s becoming more competitive,” said Gharbi, who is Ankar’s chief technology officer. luck.
The new funding for Ankar comes as intellectual property becomes increasingly critical to corporate value. Intangible assets such as IP now represent 90% of the value of S&P 500 companies, according to the World Intellectual Property Organization. Yet systems for protecting assets remain stubborn, according to Gomez and Gharbi, who say they witnessed how time-consuming and difficult it was to get a patent when they worked at Palantir.
“To go from something that is in the head of the inventor – an innovation – to something that is a bankable asset that can be used by the company in the form of a patent, basically,” said Gomez, who is the CEO of Ankar. “The tools to do that are either very legacy or non-existent. It’s like a hodgepodge of manual processes.”
Patent attorneys can spend weeks searching through dozens of databases and reading patent filings to try to determine where, if any, prior patents may conflict with the new invention they hope to protect. Then it can take several more weeks to create a patent application with the right arguments to try to overcome any objections from the patent examiners. Securing a patent can take up to 24 months.
Ankar wants to use big language models to streamline the 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 find patent filings from databases that previously took a lot of searching and reading time to discover.
The startup’s invention discovery tool searches 150 million patent applications and 250 million scientific publications and produces reports that evaluate how “novel” an invention is and what claims have already been made in previously patented inventions that may be similar (what the patent world knows as “prior art.”) The platform helps inventors find their ideas and guides in drafting their ideas. in existing patents where claims for a new invention can gain the most traction. It also supports patent attorneys when they need to respond to possible challenges from patent examiners, giving them a view of the entire history of the application process.
“Patent claims are the basis of the scope of protection for your invention—like, what are the most important pieces of my invention that I want to protect? (Ankar’s) tool helps suggest an initial set of claims and then helps the patent attorney think through potential options for expanding these claims,” Gharbi said. “So it’s no longer about just helping you generate words, because we think the value of just generating words will decrease over time. It’s going to be more like, how do I create the best qualities of coverage?”
The company has landed some notable early customers, including global cosmetics giant L’Oréal and global law firm Vorys. Ankar says that so far its customers have reported an average 40% increase in productivity, with hundreds of hours diverted to high-value strategic work.
Jean-Yves Legendre, competitive IP intelligence manager at L’Oréal, praised Ankar in a statement, saying the startup “understands patents, speaks our language, and adapts to our needs.”
Many global companies, especially in the automotive, electronics, and R&D-heavy sectors are redoubling efforts to protect their intellectual property, worried that generative AI will make it easier for competitors to copy product designs, architectures, and processes. At the same time, many companies are eager to record and protect their IP because they want to use it to train or improve their own AI models to help improve productivity.
Ankar plans to use the new funding to double its current 20-person headcount and expand its engineering, product, design, and go-to-market teams across Europe and the US.
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
