Stilta Nets $10.5 Million Seed Round to Help Firms Hunt Down Forgotten Patents

Stilta raised $10.5 million in a seed financing round led by Andreessen Horowitz, with participation from Y Combinator and executives from companies including OpenAI, Legora and Lovable. The Stockholm-based startup says its software helps businesses identify and analyze patents they’ve ignored for years, turning slow, expensive intellectual property reviews into a faster, cheaper process that in some cases can yield enforceable claims or licensing opportunities.

The product lets a user feed a patent number and related documents into the system; a set of AI modules then scans for similar filings, potential conflicts and the prosecution and court history tied to the case. The platform aggregates findings into a package meant to be usable by attorneys — including claim charts and precise references to supporting material — while leaving final judgment and strategy decisions to humans. Company executives describe the result as a way to replicate the output of experienced IP teams at far greater scale.

CEO Oskar Block traces the idea to experiences across entrepreneurship and industry. He began building predictive models for sports wagers as a teen, later moved into consulting on AI adoption and then worked at an autonomous trucking firm where he watched patent reviews grind along manually. A conversation with Tobias Estreen and Estreen’s father, a long-practicing patent attorney, underscored how repetitive and time-consuming prior-art searches and document review had become. Block and Estreen joined forces with Petrus Werner and Oscar Adamsson to launch the startup to automate that work.

The move comes as legal technology attracts more attention amid broader advances in artificial intelligence. Stilta joins competitors including Solve Intelligence and DeepIP in a growing field aimed at automating research and analysis previously done by paralegals and junior attorneys. Independent observers say the analytical portion of litigation is ripe for automation, even though judges and juries — and the lawyers representing clients — will continue to make the ultimate calls in disputes. “Lowering the price of analysis changes the playbook for companies,” said an IP strategist who asked not to be named. “Assets that sat idle because they were too costly to evaluate suddenly matter.”

For many smaller companies and in-house teams, the practical effect could be straightforward: patents that were filed and then sidelined can be reassessed for commercial value. Historically, the cost of assembling a defensible case or licensing presentation kept firms from digging into thousands of dormant filings. Stilta’s investors say reducing that hurdle could make enforcement and monetization realistic for a lot more organizations, while critics warn that automated tools need careful human oversight to avoid errors and overreach.

Block says the startup’s goal isn’t to replace lawyers but to change what they can accomplish. He argues businesses will need to decide how aggressively to exploit newly visible IP as the expense of analysis drops, and that the broader question is whether companies are prepared for the strategic choices that become available once the analytical bottleneck is eased.