Stilta, a legal tech startup founded by CEO Oskar Block and three partners, has secured a $10.5 million seed funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z). Additional investors include Y Combinator and operators from notable firms such as OpenAI, Legora, and Lovable. The company launched with the mission of helping organizations rediscover and leverage the value of dormant patents that have remained unanalyzed due to the prohibitive costs of traditional research. Block's journey to founding Stilta began with his early experiences in machine learning and AI strategy consulting. After observing the manual and sluggish nature of patent processes during his time at an autonomous trucking company, he realized that the intellectual property sector was ripe for automation. This insight was solidified during a conversation with a patent attorney who described decades of repetitive document review. Teaming up with co-founders Tobias Estreen, Petrus Werner, and Oscar Adamsson, Block built an AI platform designed to automate the labor-intensive research and analytical work behind intellectual property cases. The Stilta platform functions as a collaborative team of AI agents. Users input a patent number along with relevant content, and the system begins searching for conflicting patents, identifying similar properties that may apply, and retrieving filing and court histories. According to Block, these agents reason in parallel and converge on conclusions much like a room full of specialists would, but at a scale impossible for humans to match. Despite this automation, the system is designed to keep human lawyers in the driver's seat to guide the analysis rather than replace it. The output is described as litigation-grade, delivering detailed reports and claim charts with precise citations for every piece of evidence. This launch positions Stilta alongside competitors like Solve Intelligence and DeepIP in a rapidly growing legal tech sector driven by the broader AI boom. Block notes that while the legal industry is undergoing a transformation, the pace varies across different functions. He argues that analytical work is already being overtaken by AI, whereas the final decision-making in cases remains a human responsibility. A primary goal of Stilta is to lower the cost barrier that has prevented many companies from enforcing, licensing, or properly analyzing their intellectual property portfolios. By making the patent litigation process more efficient and affordable, the company hopes to unlock latent value for businesses that have long kept their patents on the shelf. Block emphasized that the critical challenge is not whether the legal system is prepared for AI, but whether companies are ready to exploit what becomes possible once the analytical bottleneck is removed. This funding round signals investor confidence in Stilta's ability to reshape how corporations manage and monetize their intellectual property assets.