Oskar Block has never been able to stay away from entrepreneurship for long.
He was just 18 when he launched his first startup, building machine learning models for sports betting. “I’ve always been drawn to solving difficult data problems,” he told TechCrunch. He went on to consulting, where he helped companies with their AI integration strategies and learned what it took to get large enterprises to embrace the technology.
Block then took a role at an autonomous trucking company, where he saw firsthand how manual and slow the patent process was. The idea for his next company came one evening at dinner with a friend and colleague, Tobias Estreen, when Estreen’s father, a patent attorney, started recounting what his days looked like: “Reading the same kind of documents, the same way he had for thirty years,” Block recalled.
Block and Estreen saw an opening and teamed up with two others, Petrus Werner and Oscar Adamsson, to launch Stilta, an AI platform designed to automate the research and analytical work behind intellectual property cases — the kind of labor-intensive work that has historically made patent litigation slow and expensive. The startup announced a $10.5 million seed round on Tuesday, led by Andreessen Horowitz. Other investors include Y Combinator and operators from companies like OpenAI, Legora, and Lovable.
Block, the company’s CEO, said Stilta works like a team of lawyers. Users put a patent number into the software along with any relevant content, and from there, a network of AI agents gets to work, searching for other patents might conflict with the claim, flagging similar property that could apply, and pulling the filing and court history of the patent.
“They reason in parallel and converge the way a room full of specialists would, but at a scale no human team can match,” Block said, adding that the lawyer or professional using the platform is still in the “driver’s seat” by guiding the analysis, not ceding it. “The output is litigation-grade: a report and claim charts with pinpoint citations to every piece of evidence.”
Other companies in this space include Solve Intelligence and DeepIP. Legal tech has become a hot sector amid the broader AI boom. Block said parts of the legal industry are already seeing AI-accelerated change, while other parts may not be ready for it for a long time.
The analytical work, he said, is already being overtaken by AI. For now, it’s still humans deciding the outcomes of cases. He also noted that many companies are holding on to patents they’ve “never enforced, never licensed, never even analyzed properly because the cost of doing so was prohibitive.”
That cost barrier is what Stilta aims to lower. Making the patent litigation process more efficient and affordable could open up new doors for many companies that have long left their IP on the shelf and change how they think about the latent value sitting inside their patent portfolios.
“The question isn’t really whether the legal system is prepared for AI,” Block said. “It’s whether companies are prepared for what becomes possible when the analytical bottleneck disappears.”
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