Having just raised a seed round led by Index Ventures, today’s startup is a smidge later-stage than we’d usually cover here at PreSeed Now, but sometimes we have to wait, and this is one of those cases - and it’s worth catching up on what they’re up to.

Scroll down as we dig into what Ankar and its ex-Palantir founders are working on…

– Martin

How Ankar is building an 'operating system for innovation’

As we’ve explored in the past, there seems to be a gap in the market for a tool that helps innovators and inventors make the right decisions, understand what IP is already out there, and make the most of their ideas.

Ankar is a notable new addition to this field, promising to “empower IP and R&D teams with tailor-made artificial intelligence to operate more efficiently, thoroughly, and productively.”

The startup was founded by Tamar Gomez and Wiem Gharbi, building on their experiences at software giant Palantir, where they previously worked in product deployment.

“We shared the experience at Palantir of being an inventor, and having invented a new technology, and trying to navigate the process of protecting that technology and securing patents. We realised that this process couldn't really keep up with the pace of innovation, especially in the age of AI,” says Gomez.

“We also realised that our experience really wasn't unique within organisations and companies, and there was a major market for a new platform, a solution that becomes the operating system of innovation.”

This ‘operating system of innovation’ is what they have built Ankar to be. It helps inventors identify what is novel and patentable in their inventions.

Gomez gives the example of an R&D team at a pharmaceutical company that might have invented a new compound.

“Before Ankar, if you had an idea for an invention, or if you had invented something, you would have to write a 30-page memo that then you would have to send to the intellectual property team in your company. And then the intellectual property team would take have to go and read through thousands of patents and literature to make sure that it's actually novel,” Gomez says.

Instead, they can put brief details of their creation into Ankar. The tool drafts the memo, and identifies prior art that might overlap with the compound and reduce its chance of being successfully patented. This can allow the R&D team to quickly move on to adjusting their creation to be truly unique.

For the intellectual property team within this hypothetical pharma company, Ankar will help them draft the patent “twice as fast as if you were doing it manually,” Gomez claims.

The story so far

A far way from where she is today, Gomez says she began her career in oil and gas exploration, including time in Western Africa and South America.

Following this, she moved London to do a PhD in micro-economics, development economics, and game theory at Imperial College. And then she joined Palantir for three years, where she met Gharbi. Gomez went on to spend a year as a product manager at defence tech company Helsing, before co-founding Ankar with Gharbi at the start of last year.

Gomez said Ankar has worked with Fortune 500 companies in the automotive, aeronautics, pharmaceutical, and software industries, such as automotive company Valeo, to “battle test” the product during its development.

“It's being used every day by researchers, but also the intellectual property team, patent engineers,” she says.

As for the year ahead?

“We're going to double down on our engineering team and on our products, and then we'd also like shift gears in terms of go-to-market, so we'll be looking at scaling our go to market to more verticals, more companies within each vertical and other geographies.”

Go deeper on Ankar:

Funding:

Ankar has just announced its first raise, a £3 million seed round led by Index Ventures, with participation from Daphni, Motier Ventures, Booom and Puzzle Ventures, as well as angels such as Datadog CEO Olivier Pomel and Hugging Face CTO Julien Chaumond.

In a prepared quote for the press release to accompany the news, Hannah Seal, partner at Index Ventures, described Ankar as “turning IP from a defensive legal asset into a strategic growth lever… as innovation and R&D lie at the heart of economic growth and progress more broadly.”

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