Vilnius-based legaltech startup EnforceShield has raised €1.7 million in a seed round led by Vendep Capital, with participation from FIRSTPICK VC, to expand its autonomous intellectual property enforcement platform. EnforceShield uses AI agents to automate the IP enforcement process from detecting potential infringements and conducting legal analysis to validating cases, executing platform-specific takedowns, monitoring repeat violations and escalating complex cases. The company will use the funding to expand its technical and product capabilities, including more advanced workflows for escalation, repeat offenders and complex enforcement cases, while also supporting commercial expansion in the US, which the company says currently represents up to 80% of its sales pipeline.
In 2026, AI-powered IP abuse is running rampant. Counterfeits, unauthorized sellers, fake listings, cloned storefronts, impersonation ads and sites, and phishing pages all poach demand from original brands. The OECD values the global trade in counterfeit goods at approximately USD 467 billion, or 2.3% of total global imports. Human-led enforcement teams can only scale linearly, with every additional lawyer or analyst adding a limited amount of capacity. Compare this to AI-powered abuse, which scales at near-zero marginal cost. The EU has now named IP crime a formal law-enforcement priority for 2026-2029, with EUIPO pointing to a widening gap between rising infringement and constrained enforcement capacity. In this environment, AI-based solutions that stop at detection are necessarily incomplete.
EnforceShield is the AI-powered answer to AI-powered IP abuse and the brainchild of Rytis Rudzinskas, an experienced attorney who spent years running digital IP enforcement operations manually for clients. He saw firsthand that throwing an ever-increasing number of lawyers and analysts at IP enforcement would never solve its scaling problems. With IP abusers turning en masse to AI, Rudzinskas realized IP enforcement had to respond in kind.
EnforceShield runs as a SaaS solution for continuous, autonomous IP enforcement, executing the complete workflow from cross-platform detection through legal analysis, validation, takedown execution, monitoring, and escalation—rather than simply identifying potential infringements for a human team to handle. Validation applies jurisdictionally correct legal logic to each case before the system executes takedowns tailored to each platform and monitors for reappearing violations. This logic encompasses evaluating factors such as evidence packs, original brand IP portfolio, applicable laws, likelihood of confusion, unauthorized use, platform context, and enforcement success criteria.
Attorneys and analysts shouldn’t be tasked with the repetitive operational work of routine infringement cases, so EnforceShield is designed to autonomously execute it from the outset. The platform’s AI agents make case-level enforcement decisions using its built-in jurisdictionally dependent legal and platform-specific decision logic. This enables its ‘human-at-the-end’ model, where analysts and attorneys only approve system outcomes, and handle flagged exceptions or complex escalations.
Rytis Rudzinskas, CEO and founder of EnforceShield, said: “When I founded this company, I felt we were already operating on borrowed time. Generative AI had made IP abuse a booming business, but enforcement was still largely a human-scale operation. Enterprises didn’t need more lawyers or even a software co-pilot. They needed tech that’s able to think like a lawyer and pilot itself through enforcement workflows. We started by reworking the legal operational workflows I’ve spent years building and operating manually and encoded that expertise into a system that can run autonomously. EnforceShield is now freeing human teams from a glut of repetitive work they’ll never manage manually, and developing the most sophisticated software that can perform the operational enforcement function itself and at scale.”
This design decouples enforcement volume from headcount: enterprises can handle dramatically greater case volumes without scaling legal or brand-protection teams proportionately. It’s also what makes same-day onboarding possible. EnforceShield asks for minimal upfront data, ingests it directly, and returns results, often surfacing infringements clients didn’t even notice.
Artis Bisers, Investment Manager at Vendep Capital, said: “AI has made turning service businesses into software into a massive opportunity, and legal services are ripe for this shift. Finding counterfeits was never the hard part for brands. The value lies in everything that happens after discovery, and EnforceShield handles that whole process in one system rather than stopping at detection. Rytis worked on this problem himself for years before building the company, which is precisely the expertise needed to automate it properly. This team has shown it can turn that knowledge into product at genuine speed. We are delighted to be backing them as they extend that automation to every channel where brands are being copied.”
The company was established in 2024 by Rytis Rudzinskas, who self-funded early platform development with fellow partners at CEE Attorneys, the law firm where he was a partner. Experienced software developer Aidis Stukas and his team took over the technical build in spring 2025. A year later, Stukas committed fully, joining as CTO with an ownership stake and bringing his full team into the company as well. By the time EnforceShield raised its seed round, it already had a functional product in the market, with customers spanning consumer/D2C brands, multi-brand portfolios, and other companies subject to regular IP abuse.
The funding will grow the overall technical and product capacity needed to automate the next layer of the IP enforcement process. The next phase of development will extend EnforceShield agents beyond standardized takedowns to manage escalation, repeat offenders, and more complex enforcement pathways. The platform already operates globally, and the funding will also support commercial expansion in the US, which already accounts for up to 80% of EnforceShield’s sales pipeline. EnforceShield’s overarching ambition is to become the enforcement engine of choice for all IP enterprise holders, from e-commerce and tech to sports, media, and publishing.
Read the orginal article: https://arcticstartup.com/enforceshield-raises-e1-7-million-seed/
