Swedish Legal Tech Startup Stilta Raises $10.5 Million Seed to Bring AI Agents to Patent Work
Fundraise Insider tracks newly funded startups each week and delivers verified C-suite contacts straight to your inbox, so you reach the right people while the funding is still fresh. See pricing.
Stilta, an AI platform built to automate the research and analytical work behind intellectual property cases, has raised a $10.5 million seed round led by Andreessen Horowitz. Y Combinator also took part, along with operators from companies such as OpenAI, Legora, and Lovable.
The company traces back to Oskar Block, who launched his first startup at 18 building machine learning models for sports betting before moving into consulting, where he helped large enterprises with AI integration. He later worked at an autonomous trucking company, where he saw firsthand how manual and slow the patent process was. The idea for Stilta took shape over dinner with his friend and colleague Tobias Estreen, whose father, a patent attorney, described doing the same kind of work the same way for 30 years. Block and Estreen teamed up with Petrus Werner and Oscar Adamsson to build the company.
Block, who serves as chief executive, says Stilta works like a team of lawyers. A user enters a patent number along with any relevant content, and from there a network of AI agents searches for other patents that might conflict with the claim, flags similar property that could apply, and pulls the filing and court history of the patent. The agents work in parallel and converge the way a room full of specialists would, while the lawyer or professional using the platform stays in control and guides the analysis rather than handing it off. The output is meant to be litigation-grade, including a report and claim charts with pinpoint citations to every piece of evidence.
Other companies working in this space include Solve Intelligence and DeepIP, and legal tech has become an active sector during the broader AI boom. Block argues that the analytical side of legal work is already being overtaken by AI, even as humans continue to decide the outcomes of cases. He also points out that many companies hold patents they have never enforced, licensed, or properly analyzed, simply because the cost of doing so was prohibitive. Lowering that cost barrier is what Stilta aims to do, potentially opening up value sitting unused inside corporate patent portfolios.
The capital will fund the company’s first hires beyond its four co-founders, with engineering and go-to-market roles in Stockholm and plans for a New York office by the end of the year.