Stilta gets $10.5M to automate expensive patent research

Stilta raises – Stilta, an AI platform built to speed up and reduce the cost of patent litigation research, has raised a $10.5 million seed round led by Andreessen Horowitz with Y Combinator and investors tied to OpenAI, Legora, and Lovable. The company says its AI agents pul

On the night the idea finally clicked, the story started with a dinner table—and a father who had spent decades reading the same kind of patent documents. Oskar Block listened as Tobias Estreen’s father described the routine: poring over filings, again and again, the way he’d done for thirty years.

Block didn’t need much convincing. He’d already watched how slow and manual patent work could be when he took a role at an autonomous trucking company. Before that. he’d been building machine learning models at just 18 for sports betting. then moved into consulting. where he helped companies with AI integration strategies—learning what it really takes to get large enterprises to adopt new technology.

The next step was turning that frustration into a company. Block and Tobias Estreen teamed up with Petrus Werner and Oscar Adamsson to launch Stilta. an AI platform meant to automate the research and analytical work behind intellectual property cases. Patent litigation, they point out, has long been held back by labor-intensive processes that make it slow and expensive.

Stilta announced a $10.5 million seed round on Tuesday, led by Andreessen Horowitz. Y Combinator is also backing the startup, along with operators from OpenAI, Legora, and Lovable.

Block says Stilta is designed to work like a team of lawyers. The user starts by entering a patent number into the software along with any relevant content. From there. a network of AI agents goes to work searching for other patents that 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. He added that the lawyer or professional using the platform remains in the “driver’s seat” by guiding the analysis rather than ceding control. The output, he said, is “litigation-grade”: a report and claim charts with pinpoint citations to every piece of evidence.

The pitch lands in a moment when legal tech has become a hot corner of the AI boom. Block said parts of the legal industry are already seeing AI-accelerated change, while other areas may not be ready for a long time.

Still, he frames the core issue more plainly: the analytical work is already being overtaken by AI, but for now it’s humans deciding outcomes in cases. Where Stilta hopes to make its mark is the gap between what humans can do and how much it costs to do it.

Block said many companies sit on patents they’ve “never enforced. never licensed. never even analyzed properly because the cost of doing so was prohibitive.” Stilta aims to lower that barrier and make the patent litigation process more efficient and affordable—potentially changing how companies think about the patents already sitting in their portfolios.

The broader question, Block said, isn’t whether the legal system is ready for AI. “The question isn’t really whether the legal system is prepared for AI,” he said. “It’s whether companies are prepared for what becomes possible when the analytical bottleneck disappears.”

Other companies in the space include Solve Intelligence and DeepIP.

Stilta Andreessen Horowitz Y Combinator patent litigation AI agents legal tech intellectual property seed round claim charts