Oskar Block never managed to stay away from entrepreneurship for long.
He was just 18 when he launched his first startup, building machine learning models for sports betting. “I’ve always been drawn to solving hard data problems,” he told TechCrunch. He moved on to consulting, where he helped companies with their AI integration strategies and learned what it took to get large enterprises to embrace the technology.
Block then took a role at a stand-alone trucking company, where he saw firsthand how manual and slow the patent process was. The idea for his next company came one night over dinner with a friend and colleague, Tobias Estreen, when Estreen’s father, a patent attorney, began recounting what his days looked like: “Reading the same documents, the same way he had for 30 years,” Block recalls.
Block and Estreen saw an opening and teamed up with two others, Petrus Werner and Oscar Adamsson, to launch Stiltaan artificial intelligence platform designed to automate the investigative and analytical work behind intellectual property cases—the kind of labor-intensive work that has historically made patent litigation slow and expensive. The startup announced a $10.5 million seed round on Tuesday, led by Andreessen Horowitz. Other investors include Y Combinator and operators from companies such as OpenAI, Legora and Lovable.
Block, the company’s chief executive, said Stilta operates like a team of lawyers. Users put a patent number into the software along with any related content, and from there, a network of AI agents goes to work, looking for other patents that might conflict with the claim, flagging similar property that might apply, and pulling the patent’s filing and court history.
“They’re thinking in parallel and converging the way a room full of experts would, but on a scale that no human team can match,” Block said, adding that the lawyer or practitioner using the platform is still in the “driver’s seat” guiding the analysis, not delivering it. “The result is litigation-grade: a report and claims charts with precise references to each piece of evidence.”
Other companies in this space include Solve Intelligence and DeepIP. Legal technology has become a hot field amid the broader AI boom. Block said parts of the legal industry are already seeing AI-accelerated changes, while other parts may not be ready for a long time.
Analytical work, he said, is already being overtaken by AI. For now, they are still the people who decide the outcome of the cases. He also noted that many companies hold patents that they have “never enforced, never licensed, never even properly analyzed because the cost to do so was prohibitive.”
This cost barrier is what Stilta aims to reduce. Making the patent resolution process more efficient and affordable could open new doors for many companies that have long shelved their IP and change the way they think about the latent value within their patent portfolios.
“The question is not really whether the legal system is prepared for artificial intelligence,” Block said. “It’s whether companies are prepared for what’s possible when the analytics bottleneck goes away.”
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