Palantir veterans’ startup Ankar raises €17 million to expand AI-driven IP software into the US | EU-Startups

Ankar, a London-based AI platform innovating how companies and law firms capture and protect their patents, has raised a €17 million ($20 million) Series A round to grow its team and expand further into the US.

The round was led by Atomico, with Index Ventures doubling down and Norrsken VC and Daphni participating – bringing 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says: “Invention is how we solve humanity’s biggest challenges, yet the systems that protect those ideas are decades out of date.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 points to steady funding activity across AI-driven LegalTech and IP-adjacent software in Europe.

Alongside Ankar’s Series A, Madrid-based iPNOTE raised a €857k Seed round to scale its AI-powered platform aimed at reducing and managing 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, while Copenhagen-based Pandektes closed a €2.9 million Seed round to automate legal research and navigation of European legislation. In the UK, London-based Augmetec raised over €2.4 million to further develop its AI-enabled legal workflow platform.

Taken 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 Seed stage, positioning Ankar’s round at the larger end of the funding spectrum for the sector in 2025.

While none of the directly comparable IP-focused startups reported this year are UK-based, activity across Spain, the Netherlands, Denmark and the UK indicates 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 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, Ankar says fragmented tools, gaps in AI trust, and slow enterprise adoption have held organisations back. The company looks to solve these challenges with an OS that unifies the entire patent lifecycle into one secure workflow.

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

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“.

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 discourages inventors from filing altogether.

Ankar 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.”

According to data provided by the company, their platform delivers an average 40% boost in productivity, with 96% of users saying they would recommend the platform to colleagues. This is notable, as figures show that 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.

This new capital will be used to double the company’s 20-person team, expand engineering, product and design, and grow Ankar’s 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, which the company believes will be the core infrastructure of 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.”