Palantir alumni Tamar Gomez and Wiem Gharbi have raised a £3m (€3.6m) seed round led by global investor Index for Ankar, a startup developing an AI-powered platform helping researchers file patents for their inventions faster.
French investors Daphni and Motier Ventures, German VCs Booom and Puzzle Ventures also participated in the round, alongside high-profile angels such as Datadog CEO Olivier Pomel and Hugging Face CTO Julien Chaumond.
Launched in London in 2023, Ankar helps researchers sift through scientific literature to check their invention against existing patents, and then draft patent submissions — a process that currently takes months. The tool can also be used to detect infringements once a patent has been filed.
Gomez says lengthy patent submission processes was a problem she and cofounder Gharbi experienced first-hand at US Big Data giant Palantir, where they were both “deployment strategists”, meaning they built products to answer specific customer needs.
“Palantir was growing an IP portfolio,” she tells Sifted. “We had invented systems and wanted to get them patented. We realised the existing patent process couldn’t keep up with innovation.”
AI for IP
Inventors can use Ankar’s platform at different steps of the patent filing process, says Gomez.
The platform, which provides an AI model trained on publicly available patent data, assists with writing the “technical memo” — the document researchers send to legal teams to describe their invention, which is used to check if a similar patent already exists. It can then support the legal team by looking through thousands of documents, conference reports and academic literature to compare the invention against existing technologies.
Once the uniqueness of the invention has been established, the platform also provides an AI assistant to draft patent applications.
Ankar is not the only company applying AI to the field of IP: Balderton-backed DeepIP, which is based in the US and France, offers a similar assistant integrated in Microsoft Word for drafting patent applications. Earlier this year, DeepIP raised a $15m Series A.
Gomez says Ankar differentiates itself from competitors because it covers the “entire product cycle” of patent applications, from technical memo to infringement detection.
A global product
Ankar is subscription-based and has already started generating revenue. Gomez declines to share numbers but says the startup has seen traction with larger organisations which have complex research and development (R&D) processes, including Fortune500 companies like French automotive supplier Valeo.
Key verticals include automotive, aeronautics, chemical manufacturing, drug discovery, consumer goods and cosmetics, she adds. Most of the startup’s customers are currently based in France and Europe, with some in the US and China.
“The structure of patents means there are subtleties that differ between regions, but in essence it’s quite similar,” says Gomez. “So our product is global by default.”
With the seed round Ankar plans to expand its engineering and go-to-market teams. The company is also looking to open an office in Paris.
Read the orginal article: https://sifted.eu/articles/palantir-alumni-ankar-ai-patents/
