Oskar Block has never been able to stay away from entrepreneurship for any length of time.
He was only 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 continued in consulting, helping companies with their AI integration strategies and learning what it would take to get large companies to adopt the technology.
Block then took a role at an independent 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 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’s been doing 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 slower and more 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 such as OpenAI, Legora and Lovable.
Block, the company’s CEO, said Stilta operates like a team of lawyers. Users enter a patent number into the software along with any relevant content, and from there a network of AI agents goes to work, searching for other patents that may conflict with the claim, flagging similar properties that may apply, and pulling the patent application and legal history of the patent.
“They reason in parallel and converge as 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” by guiding the analysis, not delivering it. “The output is in litigation: a report and claim charts 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 experiencing AI-accelerated change, while other parts may not be ready for a long time.
The analytical work, he said, is already being overtaken by AI. For now, it is still people who decide the outcome of cases. He also noted that many companies hold on to patents they “never enforced, never licensed, never even properly analyzed 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 new doors for many companies that have long shelved their IP and change how they think about the latent value sitting in their patent portfolios.
“The question isn’t really whether the justice system is prepared for artificial intelligence,” Block said. “It’s whether companies are prepared for what becomes possible when the analytical bottleneck disappears.”
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