London-based startup Ankar has raised a £3 million seed round led by Index Ventures to scale its AI-driven platform that allows customers to discover, protect, and monetise Intellectual Property.
The round also attracted participation from Daphni, Motier Ventures, Booom, and Puzzle Ventures, along with notable angel investors such as Olivier Pomel (CEO of Datadog) and Julien Chaumond (CTO of Hugging Face).
Founded in 2024 by Tamar Gomez and Wiem Gharbi, both alumni of Palantir, Ankar leverages a suite of AI agents trained on legal and scientific data to streamline the lifecycle of innovation.
According to data from WIPO, up to 90 percent of enterprise value now lies in intangible assets, including IP. This shift has raised the stakes for companies to better manage and commercialise their innovation portfolios — particularly in high-stakes sectors like pharmaceuticals, aerospace, and software.
Ankar addresses the inefficiencies that often plague R&D and IP processes, such as laborious invention memos, translation issues, and the high cost of legal review. The founders, who faced these obstacles first-hand at Palantir, built Ankar to automate and enhance those processes using AI.
“Recent developments in artificial intelligence signal a seismic shift in how humanity invents," said Tamar Gomez, co-founder of Ankar. "As AI becomes more deeply integrated with the invention process, we're about to witness an explosion in the rate of discovery. Ankar is positioning itself at the center of this transformation by building the operating system of innovation.”
“Our platform dramatically streamlines this process and mountains of documents which slow down research today,” said Wiem Gharbi, co-founder of Ankar. “But improving efficiency is only the beginning — building AI into the invention process, along with the inventors, allows inventors to fundamentally expand the horizons of what we can imagine creating. We believe Ankar is creating the foundation for the next generation of breakthrough technologies."
One early customer is Valeo, a global automotive supplier that co-developed with Ankar to streamline and enhance their patent processes.
“Innovation and protection of IP are at the heart of Valeo’s strategy,” said Murielle Khairallah, Valeo’s Vice President of Intellectual Property. “Our co-development with Ankar and the use of their generative AI solutions strengthen our capacity to protect our innovations and optimise our process for patent filings. This modern approach is fully aligned with our operational excellence and our position of technological leader in the automotive industry."
With IP strategy increasingly central to business success, and global patent filings rising year-on-year, Ankar is tapping into a large and growing market. In Europe, recent regulatory and competitive pressures have only amplified the demand for tools that help enterprises innovate efficiently and defensibly.
“Tamar and Wiem are redefining how innovation is captured, protected, and commercialised — turning IP from a defensive legal asset into a strategic growth lever,” said Hannah Seal, Partner at Index Ventures. “As innovation and R&D lie at the heart of economic growth and progress more broadly, we’re excited to back Ankar on their mission to empower more teams to turn bold ideas into lasting outcomes."
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