Ankar has raised £15 million in a Series A round led by Atomico, with participation from Index Ventures, Norrsken VC and Daphni. Ankar is the AI platform transforming how companies and law firms capture and protect their patents. The funding comes as AI is fundamentally changing how inventions become protected assets and organisations are seeking faster, more defensible patent workflows.
Invention is how humanity’s biggest challenges are solved, and AI is fundamentally changing how inventions become protected assets. It enables patent teams to analyse novelty, draft claims and evaluate prior art with unprecedented depth and speed. Yet fragmented tools, gaps in AI trust, and slow enterprise adoption have held organisations back. Ankar solves these challenges with an operating system that unifies the entire patent lifecycle into one secure workflow for the first time.
Its platform orchestrates how ideas become defensible IP globally, bringing novelty assessment, drafting and prosecution together so teams can do in hours what once took weeks. Acting as an assistant rather than an autopilot, Ankar delivers end-to-end strategic patent generation with stronger claims, clearer framing and more defensible portfolios.
Patents can take up to 24 months to secure and still rely on scattered Word documents, spreadsheets, emails and outdated IP systems.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 discourages inventors from filing altogether.
Ankar replaces 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 high-quality draft applications with strategic guidance on claim strength and scope, and consolidates all history and analysis into a single view when examiners respond - enabling faster, stronger and more defensible outcomes, just as competition for IP is intensifying.
Patent workflows require the highest confidentiality in the enterprise world, and Ankar has been built for this. The co-founders previously built mission-critical software in Europe and the US, experience that now shapes Ankar’s approach to secure patent retrieval, claim-level reasoning, LLM governance and AI safety inside enterprise-controlled environments.
This matters more than ever as generative AI is making it easier for competitors to replicate designs, architectures and experimental approaches. As a result, C-suites, especially in automotive, electronics and other R&D-heavy sectors, are prioritising deeper, more defensible patent portfolios to secure future revenue.
The platform helps patent teams go from idea to granted patent in a fraction of the time, delivering an average 40% boost in productivity and shifting hundreds of hours to high-value work. Intangible assets such as IP now make up to 90% of the value of S&P 500 companies, yet patent professionals still spend around half of their time on manual, administrative work. Ankar is showing meaningful adoption, with 96% of users saying they would recommend the platform to colleagues.
This Series A brings Ankar’s total funding to £18 million. The capital will be used to double the 20-person team, expand engineering, product and design, and grow the go-to-market organisation to support rising demand across Europe and the US. The long-term ambition is to become the software layer that orchestrates how ideas turn into defensible patents globally.
