Ankar is a London-based legal AI company building what it describes as an operating system for innovation — software that transforms how companies and law firms capture, protect and manage their intellectual property. The patent lifecycle is one of the most specialized and labor-intensive areas of legal work, spanning prior-art search, drafting, prosecution and portfolio strategy, and Ankar applies AI across that full arc to compress the manual effort involved at each stage.
The platform performs instant novelty and prior-art analysis across more than 150 million patent applications and 250 million scientific publications, giving practitioners a fast read on whether an invention is patentable and where the white space lies. It turns invention disclosures into draft patent applications with strategic guidance on claim strength and scope, and when examiners respond during prosecution, it consolidates all history and analysis into a single view so attorneys can act without reassembling context. Ankar reports an average 40% boost in productivity, with 96% of users saying they would recommend the platform.
Ankar was founded in 2024 by Tamar Gomez and Wiem Gharbi, both former Palantir employees. Gomez worked as a development strategist at Palantir and brings a business and deployment background, while Gharbi is a data scientist who worked on machine-learning applications — a pairing that mirrors Palantir's blend of forward-deployed strategy and hard ML engineering.
The company first announced a £3 million (about $4 million) seed round in May, led by Index Ventures with support from Daphni and Motier Ventures. In December 2025 it raised a $20 million (€17 million) Series A led by Atomico, with Index Ventures doubling down and Norrsken VC and Daphni participating, bringing total funding to roughly $24 million. The new capital is earmarked to grow the team and expand further into the US market.
Ankar competes in an active IP-AI category alongside players like DeepIP, Patlytics and Solve Intelligence, betting that breadth across the entire patent workflow — from search to drafting to prosecution — plus its Palantir-honed engineering rigor will make it the default operating layer for protecting innovation.