Ankar, a London startup founded by ex‑Palantir employees Tamar Gomez and Wiem Gharbi, raised $20 million in a Series A led by Atomico with participation from Index Ventures, Norrsken and Daphni to scale an LLM‑based platform that streamlines patent discovery, claim drafting and prosecution. The tool searches roughly 150 million patent applications and 250 million scientific publications to surface prior art, suggest claim language and produce novelty assessments—customers including L’Oréal and law firm Vorys report about 40% productivity gains—addressing slow, manual patent processes that can take up to 24 months at a time when IP represents an outsized share of corporate value. Ankar will use the funds to double its ~20‑person headcount and expand engineering, product, design and go‑to‑market teams across Europe and the U.S., positioning itself to help companies protect and monetize IP and to feed corporate AI initiatives.
Ankar, a London startup founded in 2024 by former Palantir employees Tamar Gomez and Wiem Gharbi, closed a $20 million Series A led by Atomico with participation from Index Ventures, Norrsken and Daphni, following a prior £3 million seed round. The founders cite direct experience with multi‑month patent workflows at Palantir as the origin of the product and plan to use the new capital to double their ~20‑person headcount and expand engineering, product and go‑to‑market teams across Europe and the U.S. The company is deploying large language models to search approximately 150 million patent applications and 250 million scientific publications to surface prior art, produce novelty assessments, suggest initial claim language and streamline prosecution work; early customers including L’Oréal and law firm Vorys report ~40% productivity gains and transfer of hundreds of hours to higher‑value work. Ankar positions its tool to address patent processes that can take up to 24 months and to help corporates both protect IP and prepare assets that could be used to train or fine‑tune internal AI models. The market context underscores demand: WIPO places intangible assets at up to 90% of S&P 500 value, and sectors such as automotive, electronics and R&D‑heavy companies are actively redoubling IP protection. Near‑term risks are execution and legal robustness of LLM outputs, the pace of enterprise adoption from pilots to widescale use, and the fact that this is an early‑stage private company with modest reported market impact and moderately positive sentiment overall.
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Overall Sentiment
moderately positive
Sentiment Score
0.45
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