Stilta Raises $10.5M to Bring AI Agents to Patent Law

Stilta, a Stockholm-based AI startup, raised $10.5 million in seed funding led by Andreessen Horowitz to automate patent litigation and intelligence workflows for enterprises and law firms.

The raise signals a broader shift in how companies approach intellectual property. Patents represent a largely untapped asset class, and AI is now making the analysis required to enforce and monetize them faster and more accessible.

The Problem

Over 90% of S&P 500 company value is intangible, yet most patents are never enforced, licensed, or monetized. The reason is not a lack of evidence. The analysis required to surface that evidence has historically been too complex and too expensive for most organizations to pursue at scale.

Patent litigation workflows have not changed significantly in decades. Attorneys spend large portions of their time on manual document review, prior art searches, and freedom-to-operate assessments that can take months to complete.

What Stilta Does

Stilta builds AI agents that reason across 180 million patents, 250 million scientific publications, and over a trillion archived web pages. The platform helps companies defend against patent assertions, identify licensing opportunities in existing portfolios, and clear paths to commercialization. Every finding is traced to a specific source document.

The company launched in February 2026 and was founded by four former McKinsey engineers who left the firm's AI practice to build Stilta.

"When one company starts using AI for patent enforcement, every competitor has to follow. That shift is happening right now. We built Stilta to be the platform IP teams reach for when the stakes are highest, and to make sure no invention worth protecting goes unprotected," said Oskar Block, co-founder and CEO of Stilta.

Early Traction

Since its February 2026 launch, Stilta has signed Roche, Alfa Laval, and Maersk as customers, alongside three of the five largest IP firms globally, either as paying customers or in active pilots.

Joakim Hernstrom, CEO at Bergenstrahle and Partners, one of the firms piloting the platform, noted the impact on attorney workflows. "When you can analyze more than 10x more patents to find critical commercialization risks, you don't just get more efficient, you get better decisions. Our attorneys can focus on partnering with our clients on what matters most, backed by top tier FTO assessments protecting them from costly infringement risks."

Freedom-to-operate (FTO) assessments are legal analyses that determine whether a product can be commercialized without infringing existing patents. These are among the most labor-intensive tasks in patent law.

Funding and Next Steps

The $10.5 million round was led by Andreessen Horowitz, with participation from Y Combinator and a group of founders and operators from companies including Sana, Legora, OpenAI, Lovable, and Listen Labs.

David Haber, General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz, described the opportunity: "Patent litigation runs on labor-intensive workflows that haven't meaningfully changed in decades. Stilta automates them and, in doing so, becomes the system of record for how enterprises protect and monetize their most valuable intangible assets."

Stilta will use the funding to hire its first employees beyond the four founders. Planned hires include engineers, go-to-market professionals, and patent experts across its Stockholm and New York offices.

About Stilta

Stilta is an agentic AI platform for patent enforcement, defense, and commercialization. Founded in 2026 by four former McKinsey engineers, the company is headquartered in Stockholm. Its platform searches across patents, scientific publications, and archived web content to surface infringement evidence, support litigation defense, and identify licensing opportunities.