Oscar Block was never able to stay away from entrepreneurship for long.
He was just 18 years old when he started his first startup, building machine learning models for sports betting. “I’ve always been interested in solving hard data problems,” he told TechCrunch. Through his consulting, he has helped companies with their AI integration strategies and learned what it takes for large enterprises to embrace the technology.
Block then worked for an autonomous trucking company and saw firsthand how manual and slow the patent process was. The idea for his next company came one evening at dinner with friend and colleague Tobias Estreen. Then Estreen’s father, a patent attorney, started talking about how his day had been. Block recalled: “We read the same types of documents in the same way.”
Block and Estreen saw an opportunity and teamed up with two others, Petrus Werner and Oscar Adamsson, to launch Stilta, an AI platform designed to automate the research and analysis tasks behind intellectual property cases. This has historically made patent litigation slow, expensive and labor-intensive. The startup announced a $10.5 million seed round on Tuesday led by Andreessen Horowitz. Other investors include Y Combinator and operators of companies such as OpenAI, Legora, and Lovable.
Block, the company’s CEO, said Stilta works like a team of lawyers. Users enter a patent number into the software along with related content, and from there a network of AI agents works to search for other patents that may conflict with the claims, flag similar properties that may apply, and pull patent applications and court records.
“They reason and converge in parallel in the same way as a room full of experts, but at a scale that no human team can match,” Block said. He added that the lawyer or expert using the platform is still in the “driver’s seat” by guiding the analysis rather than giving it away. “The results are litigation-level: reports and charge charts with accurate citations to all evidence.”
Other companies in this space include Solve Intelligence and DeepIP. Amid the AI craze, legal technology has emerged as a hot field. Block said some parts of the legal industry are already seeing changes accelerated by AI, while other parts may not be ready for it for long.
He said analytical tasks are already being overtaken by AI. For now, it is still humans who determine the outcome of events. He also pointed out that many companies have patents that “have never been enforced, never licensed, and never properly analyzed because the costs of doing so are prohibitive.”
Stilta aims to lower these cost barriers. Making the patent litigation process more efficient and less expensive can open new doors for many companies that have neglected their IP for too long and change the way they think about the potential value within their patent portfolio.
“The question is not whether the legal system is AI-ready,” Block said. “It’s about whether companies are ready for what will be possible when the analytics bottleneck disappears.”
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