Stilta raises $10.5 million from a16z and YC to help companies rediscover patents they forgot they owned

Oscar 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 hard data problems,” he told TechCrunch. He moved into consulting, where he helped companies with their AI integration strategies and learned what it took to get large companies to adopt this technology.

Block then took a role at a self-driving trucking company, where he saw firsthand how manual and slow the patent process was. The idea for his next company came one evening over dinner with a friend and colleague, Tobias Estrin, when Estrin’s father, a patent attorney, began recounting what his days were like: “Block reads the same kind of documents, the same way he’s been reading them for thirty years,” Block remembers.

Block and Estrin saw an opportunity and teamed up with two others, Petrus Werner and Oscar Adamson, to launch the project Stilta, an artificial intelligence platform It is 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 such as OpenAI, Legora, and Lovable.

Block, the company’s CEO, said Stelta operates 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 goes into action, searching for other patents that might conflict with the claim, flagging similar properties that could be applied, and pulling the patent file and filing in court.

“They think in parallel and converge the way a room full of specialists might, but on a scale that 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 abdicating to it. “The product is litigation-grade: a report and claims charts with precise citations for every piece of evidence.”

Other companies in this space include Solve Intelligence and DeepIP. Legal technology has become a hot sector amid the broader AI boom. Parts of the legal industry are already seeing accelerating change in artificial intelligence, while other parts may not be ready for that for a long time, Block said.

Analytical work has already been overtaken by artificial intelligence, he said. For now, it is still humans who decide the outcomes of cases. He also noted that many companies hold patents that they “never implemented, never licensed, and never even properly analyzed because the cost of doing so was prohibitive.”

This cost barrier is what Stelta aims to reduce. Making the patent litigation process more efficient and affordable could open new doors for many companies that have long since shelved their intellectual property, and change the way they think about the inherent value found within their patent portfolios.

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