Ankar Secures €17M To Expand AI-Powered IP Platform In The US

The round was led by Atomico, with Index Ventures doubling down, and participation from Norrsken VC and Daphni, bringing the total funding to €20 million ($24 million).

Tamar Gomez, co-founder of Ankar AI, says: “Invention is how we solve humanity’s biggest challenges, yet the systems that protect those ideas are decades out of date. AI will redefine how global organisations innovate over the next five years, turning IP from a cost centre into a growth driver. The companies that adopt Ankar now will shape the future of innovation.”

In 2025 EU-Startups reporting highlights steady funding activity across AI-driven LegalTech and IP-adjacent software in Europe.

Alongside Ankar’s Series A, Madrid-based iPNOTE raised €857k in a Seed round to scale its AI-powered platform designed to reduce and manage intellectual property costs for companies. Amsterdam-headquartered Saga secured over €1.5 million to expand its lawyer-centric AI platform for legal professionals across Europe and Latin America. Copenhagen-based Pandektes closed a €2.9 million Seed round to automate legal research and navigate European legislation. In the UK, London-based Augmetec raised over €2.4 million to further develop its AI-enabled legal workflow platform.

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Together, these 2025 funding announcements represent approximately €24.7 million in disclosed capital flowing into AI-enabled legal and IP software, when combined with Ankar’s Series A.

Most comparable companies covered by EU-Startups this year remain at the Seed stage, making Ankar’s round one of the larger funding events in the sector for 2025.

While no directly comparable IP-focused startups reported this year are UK-based, activity in Spain, the Netherlands, Denmark and the UK signals geographically distributed investor interest in applying AI to legal and intellectual property workflows.

Wiem Gharbi, co-founder of Ankar AI adds: “Patents sit at the intersection of deep technical knowledge and precise legal reasoning and AI can finally unlock real leverage in that process. Ankar gives professionals the analytical depth they’ve never had before, enabling stronger strategy and better protection. Atomico shares our ambition to build the infrastructure behind the next generation of global innovation.”

Invention is key to solving humanity's biggest challenges, and AI is fundamentally transforming how inventions are protected. It allows patent teams to analyze novelty, draft claims, and evaluate prior art with unprecedented depth and speed.

However, Ankar identifies that fragmented tools, gaps in AI trust and slow enterprise adoption have hindered progress. The company aims to solve these issues with an operating system that unifies the entire patent lifecycle into one secure workflow.

Founded in 2023 by former Palantir leaders Wiem Gharbi and Tamar Gomez, Ankar AI provides patent and R&D teams with the tools to innovate a range of tasks from invention capture to patent drafting and analysis using LLM-powered software.

Ankar’s platform orchestrates how ideas become defensible intellectual property (IP) globally, bringing novelty assessment, drafting, and prosecution together, enabling teams to complete in "hours what once took weeks."

Ankar explains that patents can take up to 24 months to secure and still rely on scattered Word documents, spreadsheets, emails, and outdated IP systems. This inefficiency slows teams down and can discourage inventors from filing patents altogether.

The company aims to replace this fragmented process with a unified platform that supports the entire patent lifecycle. It performs instant novelty and prior-art analysis across 150+ million patent applications and 250+ million scientific publications, turns invention disclosures into draft applications with strategic guidance on claim strength and scope and consolidates all history and analysis into a single view when examiners respond.

Andreas Helbig, partner at Atomico, says: “Tamar and Wiem bring exceptional technical depth and first-hand experience of how broken the patent process is. Their momentum with Fortune 500 companies shows they’re building the right product at exactly the right moment. We’re proud to support their mission as they build the foundational infrastructure for how the world’s most important ideas are protected and commercialised.”

Ankar’s platform boosts productivity by 40% on average, with 96% of users recommending it to colleagues. Amid IP now comprising up to 90% of S&P 500 value, the software reduces patent professionals’ manual work. The new funding will double the 20-person team, expand engineering, product, and design and grow the go-to-market organization in Europe and the US. Ankar aims to become the global software layer turning ideas into defensible patents, positioning itself as essential infrastructure for innovation in the AI era.

Jean-Yves Legendre, Competitive IP Intelligence Manager at L’Oréal, adds: “Most vendors came with a fixed solution. With Ankar, they began with our needs. They understood patents, spoke our language, and adapted to our needs by configuring their existing technology into a solution that fits our reality.”

About Ankar AI

Ankar AI empowers IP and R&D teams with a platform that streamlines the entire patent lifecycle, from prosecution to protection and generation. Built by experts from Palantir, Amazon and top startups it helps innovators manage complex IP efficiently and productively.