Stilta, an artificial intelligence platform built to automate research and analytical work behind intellectual property cases, announced a $10.5 million seed funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz. Y Combinator also participated, along with operators from OpenAI, Legora and Lovable.

Stilta's software allows users to input a patent number and relevant content, after which a network of AI agents searches for conflicting patents, flags similar property and retrieves the patent's filing and court history. Solve Intelligence and DeepIP are among other companies operating in the AI-enabled patent research space.

"They reason in parallel and converge the way a room full of specialists would, but at a scale no human team can match," Stilta Chief Executive Officer Oskar Block said of the agents. "The output is litigation-grade: a report and claim charts with pinpoint citations to every piece of evidence," he said.

Many companies hold patents they have never enforced, licensed or properly analyzed because the cost of doing so was prohibitive. Stilta aims to lower the cost barrier to analyzing and enforcing patents.

Block said AI is already overtaking the analytical work in the legal industry, though humans still decide the outcomes of cases. He said parts of the legal industry are experiencing AI-accelerated change, while other parts may not be ready for it for a long time.

The company was founded by Block, Tobias Estreen, Petrus Werner and Oscar Adamsson. The concept emerged from a dinner conversation with Estreen's father, a patent attorney, who described reading the same types of documents in the same way for thirty years.

Block launched his first startup at age 18, building machine learning models for sports betting, and later worked as a consultant helping companies with AI integration strategies. He subsequently took a role at an autonomous trucking company, where he observed that the patent process was manual and slow.