IP patent platform Ankar has announced the successful closing of a $20 million Series A funding round. The investment was led by Atomico, with Index Ventures doubling down on their previous commitment, and participation from Norrsken VC and Daphni. This latest round brings Ankar’s total funding to $24 million, marking a major milestone in the company’s mission to unify the fragmented patent lifecycle into a single, secure enterprise-grade operating system.
About The Company
Founded by former Palantir alumni Wiem Gharbi and Tamar Gomez, Ankar is tackling the stubbornly manual and inefficient world of intellectual property. Traditionally, patent workflows rely on a disconnected mess of spreadsheets, emails, and Word documents, often taking up to 24 months to secure a patent.
Ankar’s platform acts as an operating system for innovation, using advanced AI to aggregate, analyze, and synthesize data from over 150 million patent applications and 250 million scientific publications. By acting as an AI-powered assistant rather than an autopilot, Ankar helps patent teams move from idea to granted patent in a fraction of the time, delivering an average 40% boost in productivity. The platform is already gaining significant momentum with Fortune 500 companies in R&D-heavy sectors like pharmaceuticals, automotive, and electronics.
Funding Details
The $20 million Series A reflects the high level of investor confidence in Ankar’s technical depth and the critical nature of the problem they are solving. Lead investor Atomico joined existing backer Index Ventures to fuel Ankar’s vision of turning IP from a cost center into a strategic growth driver.
“Tamar and Wiem bring exceptional technical depth and first-hand experience of how broken the patent process is,” said Andreas Helbig, partner at Atomico. “Their momentum shows they’re building the right product at exactly the right moment.”
Security has been a foundational design principle for Ankar. Recognizing the extreme sensitivity of R&D data, the founders ensured ISO 27001 compliance early on, building a system where data remains isolated and models are grounded in verified sources to prevent inaccuracies.
Market Opportunity
In the age of AI, approximately 90% of company value is intangible—composed of patents, R&D output, and know-how. However, the sheer volume of innovation data makes it nearly impossible for human teams to digest manually. Ankar fills this gap by providing the infrastructure to extract and structure relevant insights, allowing companies to build defensible assets that contribute directly to enterprise value. As competition for IP intensifies globally, the ability to frame stronger claims and manage portfolios efficiently becomes a decisive competitive advantage.
Use of Funds
Ankar plans to use the Series A capital to double its current 20-person team, with a heavy focus on expanding engineering, product, and design departments. Additionally, the company will scale its go-to-market organization to meet the rising demand for its platform across both Europe and the US, solidifying its position as the software layer that orchestrates how global ideas become defensible patents.
