Oskar Block has never been able to stay away from the business world for long.
He was just 18 years old when he launched his first startup, creating machine learning models for sports betting. “I’ve always been drawn to solving difficult 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 the technology.
Block then took a position at an autonomous transportation company, where he saw firsthand how manual and time-consuming the patent process was. The idea for his next venture came about one night over dinner with a friend and colleague, Tobias Estreen, when Estreen’s father, a patent attorney, began recounting what his days were like: “Reading the same kind of documents, the same way he had for thirty years,” Block recalled.
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 investigative and analytical work behind intellectual property cases, the type 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 of companies such as OpenAI, Legora and Lovable.
Block, the company’s chief executive, said Stilta works like a team of lawyers. Users enter a patent number into the software along with any relevant content, and from there, a network of artificial intelligence agents gets to work, searching for other patents that may conflict with the claim, pointing out similar properties that could apply, and extracting the patent’s filing and judicial history.
“They reason in parallel and converge like a room full of specialists would, but at 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” guiding the analysis, not yielding to it. “The result is procedural quality: a report and claims tables with precise citations for each 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 changes accelerated by AI, while other parts may not be ready for it for a long time.
Analytical work, he said, is already being surpassed by AI. For now, it is still humans who decide the outcomes of cases. He also noted that many companies hold on to patents that they “have never applied, never licensed, never even properly analyzed because the cost of doing so was prohibitive.”
That cost barrier is what Stilta aims to reduce. Making the patent litigation process more efficient and affordable could open new doors for many companies that have long left their intellectual property on the shelf and change the way they think about the latent value found within their patent portfolios.
“The question is not really whether the legal system is ready for AI,” Block said. “It’s about whether companies are prepared for what will be possible when the analytical bottleneck disappears.”
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