From idea to patent: Ankar AI raises £3m to transform R&D

“Have I created something truly unique?” It’s the million-dollar question on every inventor’s lips. Often, obtaining the answer isn’t so straightforward. It will likely require weeks of researching and interpreting existing patents to see if conflicts or overlaps could prevent the commercialisation of an invention. Registering a new patent is a similarly time-sapping process, while checking for infringement quickly becomes an uphill battle, even for companies with large legal teams.

With 90% of S&P 500 company assets now intangible, checking, registering, and protecting IP is the lifeblood of R&D and a cornerstone of a huge proportion of the economy. But the entire process is currently costly, administratively intensive, and difficult. The lifecycle of invention is full of friction, which slows down companies but also economic progress — in a world where economic strength is tied to knowledge production, the tools for managing that knowledge are still stuck in the past.

Building the operating system for invention

Ankar AI is solving for this through an end-to-end AI-native IP platform. It provides R&D and IP teams with an integrated platform that spans the full innovation lifecycle — from research insights and competitive mapping, to invention discovery and patent drafting, to filing and enforcement. With advanced ML models fine-tuned on scientific and legal corpora, Ankar enables companies to drive more invention per dollar spent and extract more value per invention made.

Alongside this, Ankar actively supports innovation and revenue generation by identifying gaps in existing ecosystems where new IP could be developed or expanded. “It's really challenging for researchers and IP teams to map the absence of something,” explains co-founder Tamar Gomez. “With Ankar, they can drill down to find the white space between existing patents.” A pharma company, for example, might use Ankar to identify prospective formulations to explore.

First-hand experience with IP at Palantir and Helsing

Tamar and co-founder Wiem Gharbi met while both were working at Palantir. Tamar later moved on to Helsing, but the pair stayed in touch, convinced they would one day start a company together. Their independent experience of IP – coupled with the emergence of AI – led them to realise that this was the problem they needed to solve.

Wiem encountered the importance of protecting costly and time-intensive AI inventions at Palantir, but quickly saw that the existing approach – relying on email, web documents and multiple stakeholders – couldn’t keep pace. “It seemed like very old and slow processes were being used that distracted from time spent on the spark of inventing,” she explains.

At the same time, Tamar identified a similar challenge while supporting IP discovery and patent drafting at Helsing. “What I found most difficult was how dispossessing the experience of registering patents was,” she explains. “You’d hand lots of documents to a lawyer and not hear anything back for months. There was no coordination or way of seeing how patentable something was early on, making it hard for inventors and R&D teams to understand the upside. I thought there's got to be a better way.”

With Ankar, the power is handed to in-house IP, R&D and inventing teams – and companies are already seeing a tangible impact from using the technology. In the last three months of using Ankar, for example, automotive supplier Valeo was able to identify several potential patent infringements that warranted further action.

A founding team with first-hand experience of IP and entrepreneurship

Ankar’s early traction, combined with the speed at which they built the platform, is a testament to the action-orientated nature of Wiem and Tamar, which impressed from the first time Bastian, Carlos and I met them. Both have fantastic backstories – Tamar completed a PhD in Game Theory, focusing on conflict zones and has worked at two of Europe’s leading AI companies. Wiem grew up in a small town in Tunisia before moving to France to study on a scholarship. At Palantir, she launched Foundry for Builders, which targets early and growth-stage companies, and worked directly with the CEO.

With a world-class team at the helm, we’re excited to support Ankar as the company redefines how innovation is captured, protected, and commercialized — turning IP from a defensive legal asset into a strategic growth lever.