Oscar Block couldn't stay away from entrepreneurship for long.
He was just 18 years old when he launched his first startup building machine learning models for sports betting. “I've always been drawn to solving difficult data problems,” he told TechCrunch. He went into consulting, where he helped companies with their AI integration strategies and learned what it takes to get large enterprises to adopt this technology.
Block then worked for a self-driving truck company, where he saw firsthand how manual and time-consuming the patent process was. The idea for my next company came to me one evening at dinner with my friend and colleague Tobias Estrane. That's when Estraine's father, a patent attorney, started talking about his daily life. “I had been reading the same types of documents in the same way for 30 years,” Block recalled.
Block and Estreen saw an opportunity and teamed up with two others, Petrus Werner and Oscar Adamsson, to launch Stilta, an AI platform designed to automate the research and analysis work behind intellectual property litigation. This task has historically been a time-consuming and expensive part of patent litigation. The startup announced a $10.5 million seed round on Tuesday led by Andreessen Horowitz. Other investors include Y Combinator and operators of companies such as OpenAI, Legora, and Lovable.
Block, the company's CEO, said Stilta works like a team of lawyers. Users enter a patent number into the software along with associated content, and from there a network of AI agents works to search for other patents that may conflict with the claim, flag similar properties that may apply, and retrieve the patent's filing and court history.
“They reason and converge in parallel, just like a room full of experts, but at a scale that human teams can't match,” Block said, adding that the lawyers and experts using the platform are still in the “driver's seat” by leading the analysis and will not cede it. “The deliverables are litigation-grade: reports and billing charts that accurately cite all the evidence.”
Other companies involved in this space include Solve Intelligence and DeepIP. Legal tech has become a hot topic in the broader AI boom. Block said that while some parts of the legal industry are already seeing changes accelerated by AI, other parts may not be able to keep up with the changes for a long time.
According to him, analytical tasks are already being replaced by AI. For now, humans still decide the outcome of cases. He also noted that many companies continue to hold patents that they have “never enforced, licensed, or properly analyzed because they are prohibitively expensive.”
Stilta aims to address this cost barrier. Making the patent litigation process more efficient and affordable could open new doors for many companies that have long put their intellectual property on hold and change the way they think about the potential value hidden within their patent portfolios.
“The question isn't really whether the legal system is ready for AI,” Block said. “The key is whether companies are ready for what is possible when the analytics bottleneck is removed.”
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