Ankar, a platform leveraging AI agents to transform how innovators and companies across the world capture, protect and monetise their intellectual property (IP), has raised a £3m Seed round led by Index Ventures. They were joined by Daphni, Motier Ventures, Booom and Puzzle Ventures, as well as leading angels including Datadog CEO, Olivier Pomel and Hugging Face CTO, Julien Chaumond. Founded in 2024, the tech is already being embraced by Fortune500 companies.
Invention is the driving force behind humanity’s progress, delivering life-saving medicines, revolutionary transportation systems, and transformative energy solutions. Yet, the process of identifying inventive opportunities, securing intellectual property, and enforcing patents remains stuck in the past. Ankar is changing that with its breakthrough platform that harnesses artificial intelligence across the entire invention lifecycle.
Founded by Palantir alumni Tamar Gomez and Wiem Gharbi, Ankar’s AI agents assist inventors, R&D and IP teams to accelerate and enhance the whole innovation process. The team believe their technology will unlock a new era of global research and development.
Ankar’s platform is underpinned by state-of-the-art artificial intelligence, trained on scientific and legal data to understand the global invention landscape. This is then used to accelerate each stage of the invention process: first by identifying patent gaps and assessing an invention’s originality, then drafting patent submissions with enhanced uniqueness and defensibility, and finally detecting infringements at scale while identifying new licensing opportunities. The results in significant reductions in IP costs and unlocking new revenue streams through IP monetisation and commercialisation of new discoveries. As the wider adoption of AI drives a homogenisation of operations across different corporate entities, and with up to 90% of assets now intangible, protecting and monetising company IP is becoming essential.
Gomez and Gharbi are both seasoned leaders in the high-tech space and inventors themselves. They experienced first-hand the challenges of the patent process while working at Palantir. Their frustrations with lengthy stakeholder calls, language barriers, and countless hours drafting invention memos inspired them to create a seamless, AI-powered solution that removes barriers preventing R&D efforts from reaching their full potential.
Within just one year of founding, Ankar has deployed its technology to many leading Fortune500 innovators, including enterprises and global brands across the automotive, aeronautics, pharmaceutical and software industries. This includes global automotive supplier and Fortune500 company Valeo.
