Stilta raises $10.5M seed from a16z and YC for legal tech

Stilta, an AI platform designed to automate research and analytical work behind intellectual property cases, raised a $10.5 million seed round. The round was led by Andreessen Horowitz with participation from Y Combinator and operators from OpenAI, Legora and Lovable. The company was founded by Oskar Block, who serves as CEO, along with Tobias Estreen, Petrus Werner and Oscar Adamsson. Block launched his first startup at age 18 building machine learning models for sports betting and later worked in consulting and at an autonomous trucking company. Users input a patent number and relevant content into the Stilta platform. A network of AI agents searches for conflicting patents, flags similar property and pulls filing and court history. Block said the agents reason in parallel and converge the way a room full of specialists would but at a scale no human team can match. The lawyer or professional using the platform remains in the driver's seat by guiding the analysis rather than ceding it. The output consists of litigation-grade reports and claim charts with pinpoint citations to every piece of evidence, Block said. Other companies operating in the space include Solve Intelligence and DeepIP. Block said parts of the legal industry are already seeing AI-accelerated change while other parts may not be ready for it for a long time. The analytical work is already being overtaken by AI though humans continue to decide the outcomes of cases. Block noted that many companies hold patents they have never enforced, never licensed and never analyzed properly because the cost of doing so was prohibitive. Stilta aims to lower that cost barrier.