Our investment in Ankar: building the operating system for innovation
TLDR
- Atomico led Ankar’s $20m Series A to build an AI platform that automates the full patent lifecycle, from disclosure to granted patent.
Key Takeaways
- Ankar’s platform covers novelty search across 150m+ patents and 250m scientific publications, disclosure drafting, and examiner response in one workflow.
- Customers report a 40% average productivity boost; 96% of users say they would recommend it to colleagues.
- Clients include Fortune 500 companies such as L’Oreal and global law firm Vorys.
- Founders Tamar Gomez (PhD, Economics and Game Theory) and Wiem Gharbi each spent years at Palantir deploying mission-critical enterprise software.
- Total funding reaches $24m; capital will be used to double the team and expand GTM across Europe and the US.
Why It Matters
- Intangible assets account for roughly 90% of S&P 500 value, yet patent professionals still spend about half their time on manual administrative work.
- Patents take up to 24 months to secure under current fragmented workflows; Ankar targets that lag directly with AI-native automation.
- Generative AI is accelerating competitor replication of designs and architectures, raising the strategic urgency of building deeper, faster patent portfolios.
Atomico · 2025-12-17 · Read the original
