Ankar, the AI platform helping companies and law firms capture and protect patents, has raised $20 million in Series A funding led by Atomico. Index Ventures doubled down on its earlier investment, while Norrsken VC and Daphni also participated. The company plans to use the capital to grow its team and expand further into the US market.
The round brings Ankar’s total funding to $24 million. The investment will support the company’s plan to double its current 20-person team, strengthen its engineering and product capabilities, and scale its go-to-market operations to meet rising demand across Europe and North America.
Tackling an Outdated Patent System
Patents remain one of the most valuable assets for companies, yet the process of securing them is notoriously slow and inefficient. Getting a patent approved can take up to 24 months, and the workflow still depends on scattered Word documents, spreadsheets, emails, and legacy IP management systems. This fragmented approach slows down patent teams and often discourages inventors from filing altogether.
Ankar addresses these problems with a unified platform that supports the entire patent lifecycle. The system performs instant novelty and prior-art analysis across more than 150 million patent applications and 250 million scientific publications. It converts invention disclosures into high-quality draft applications, offering strategic guidance on claim strength and scope. When patent examiners respond, Ankar consolidates all history and analysis into a single view, enabling faster and more defensible outcomes.
The company’s AI tools act as an assistant rather than an autopilot, helping patent professionals do in hours what previously took weeks. Customers report an average 40% boost in productivity, with hundreds of hours redirected from administrative tasks to higher-value strategic work. This matters more as intangible assets like IP now represent up to 90% of the value of S&P 500 companies, yet patent professionals still spend roughly half their time on manual work.
Security Built for Enterprise AI
Patent workflows demand the highest level of confidentiality in any enterprise environment. Ankar was designed with this reality in mind. Co-founders Tamar Gomez and Wiem Gharbi previously built mission-critical software at Palantir in both Europe and the US. That experience now informs Ankar’s approach to secure patent retrieval, claim-level reasoning, LLM governance, and AI safety inside enterprise-controlled environments.
The security focus is particularly relevant now. Generative AI makes it easier for competitors to replicate designs, architectures, and experimental approaches. As a result, C-suites in R&D-heavy sectors like automotive and electronics are prioritizing deeper, more defensible patent portfolios to protect future revenue streams.
Ankar is already demonstrating strong traction. The platform has secured customers including Fortune 500 companies such as L’Oréal and global law firm Vorys. Adoption metrics show that 96% of users say they would recommend the platform to colleagues. Jean-Yves Legendre, Competitive IP Intelligence Manager at L’Oréal, said: “Most vendors came with a fixed solution. With Ankar, they began with our needs. They understood patents, spoke our language, and adapted to our needs by configuring their existing technology into a solution that fits our reality.”
Growing Demand for Patent AI
AI is changing how inventions become protected assets. The technology allows patent teams to analyze novelty, draft claims, and evaluate prior art with unprecedented depth and speed. However, fragmented tools, concerns about AI reliability, and slow enterprise adoption have held many organizations back from realizing these benefits.
Ankar’s operating system unifies the entire patent lifecycle into one secure workflow for the first time. It orchestrates how ideas become defensible IP globally, bringing novelty assessment, drafting, and prosecution together in a single platform. The result is strategic patent generation with stronger claims, clearer framing, and more defensible portfolios overall.
Founded by former Palantir leaders Wiem Gharbi and Tamar Gomez, Ankar gives patent and R&D teams the tools to innovate faster and smarter. The platform accelerates everything from invention capture to patent drafting and analysis with LLM-powered software. As the global patent landscape grows more complex, Ankar is already trusted by Fortune 500 companies and top patent law firms to protect their most valuable ideas. The long-term ambition is to become the software layer that orchestrates how ideas turn into defensible patents worldwide, infrastructure that will be central to innovation in the AI era as competition for IP continues to intensify globally.
What the Founders and Investors Say
Tamar Gomez, co-founder of Ankar AI, said: “Invention is how we solve humanity’s biggest challenges, yet the systems that protect those ideas are decades out of date. AI will redefine how global organisations innovate over the next five years, turning IP from a cost centre into a growth driver. The companies that adopt Ankar now will shape the future of innovation.”
Wiem Gharbi, co-founder of Ankar AI, said: “Patents sit at the intersection of deep technical knowledge and precise legal reasoning, and AI can finally unlock real leverage in that process. Ankar gives professionals the analytical depth they’ve never had before, enabling stronger strategy and better protection. Atomico shares our ambition to build the infrastructure behind the next generation of global innovation.”
Andreas Helbig, partner at Atomico, said: “Tamar and Wiem bring exceptional technical depth and first-hand experience of how broken the patent process is. Their momentum with Fortune 500 companies shows they’re building the right product at exactly the right moment. We’re proud to support their mission as they build the foundational infrastructure for how the world’s most important ideas are protected and commercialised.”
Investor Background and Future Plans
Atomico, the lead investor in this round, is a founder-built European venture capital firm that partners with ambitious entrepreneurs using technology to transform industries. Skype co-founder Niklas Zennström launched the firm in 2006, and its portfolio includes companies like Aiven, DeepL, Hinge Health, Klarna, Neko Health, Stripe, Supercell, and Wellhub. Index Ventures, which participated in Ankar’s earlier funding, doubled down in this Series A round, while Norrsken VC and Daphni joined as new investors.
The fresh capital will fuel Ankar’s expansion across engineering, product development, and go-to-market operations as the company scales its presence in both European and US markets.
