London based Ankar has raised €17 million in a Series A round to expand its AI powered intellectual property platform and strengthen its presence in the United States.
The round was led by Atomico, with Index Ventures increasing its stake, alongside participation from Norrsken VC and Daphni. With this raise, Ankar’s total funding now stands at €20 million.
The capital will be used to grow the team, expand engineering and product capabilities, and build out go to market operations across Europe and the US.
Modernising How Patents Are Built And Protected
Ankar focuses on a part of innovation that has changed little in decades. While R&D teams move faster than ever, patent workflows still rely heavily on fragmented tools, manual processes, and long timelines.
Ankar’s platform brings the full patent lifecycle into a single AI driven system, covering invention capture, novelty assessment, drafting, prosecution, and examiner response. The goal is to help companies and law firms turn ideas into defensible patents far more efficiently.
According to co founder Tamar Gomez, intellectual property is becoming a strategic growth lever rather than a cost centre, and AI will fundamentally reshape how organisations protect and commercialise innovation.
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A Growing Wave Of AI Legal And IP Software
Across Europe, investment into AI enabled legal and IP software has continued through 2025. Seed and early stage rounds have been announced by companies working on legal research, workflow automation, and IP cost management across Spain, the Netherlands, Denmark, and the UK.
Most of these companies remain at an early stage, making Ankar’s Series A one of the larger funding rounds in the AI legal and IP space this year. The round signals increasing investor confidence in platforms that can modernise complex, high value legal workflows.
From Fragmented Tools To A Unified Patent System
Patent teams often work across disconnected documents, emails, spreadsheets, and legacy IP systems. Filing a patent can take up to two years, and the administrative burden discourages many inventors from engaging with the process at all.
Ankar aims to replace this fragmentation with a unified operating system for patents. Its software runs instant novelty and prior art analysis across more than 150 million patent documents and over 250 million scientific publications. It then supports drafting and claim strategy while keeping all history, analysis, and correspondence in a single workflow.
The platform is designed to help teams complete in hours what previously took weeks, without removing professional judgment from the process.
Built By Operators With Deep Technical Experience
Ankar was founded in 2023 by Wiem Gharbi and Tamar Gomez, both former Palantir leaders. Their background in large scale data systems shaped the platform’s focus on security, explainability, and enterprise readiness.
According to co founder Wiem Gharbi, patents sit at the intersection of legal precision and deep technical insight, and AI finally makes it possible to unlock leverage across both dimensions at once.
Adoption And Impact
Ankar reports that its platform increases productivity for patent professionals by an average of 40 percent, with strong internal advocacy among users. As intellectual property now accounts for a significant share of enterprise value, reducing manual workload while improving patent quality has become a priority for large organisations.
The new funding will allow Ankar to double its current team of around 20 people, with hires planned across engineering, product, design, and commercial roles. Expansion in the US is a key focus, alongside continued growth in Europe.
Looking Ahead
Ankar’s ambition is to become the global software layer that turns invention into defensible intellectual property. As AI accelerates the pace of innovation, the company positions itself as core infrastructure for how the world’s most valuable ideas are protected and commercialised.
About Ankar AI
Ankar AI provides an end to end platform for managing the full patent lifecycle. Built by former leaders from Palantir and other global technology companies, the platform helps IP and R&D teams analyse novelty, draft patents, and manage prosecution through a single secure workflow designed for the AI era.
