
On December 17, 2025, London‑based startup Ankar announced a $20 million Series A round led by Atomico, with Index Ventures, Norrsken VC and Daphni participating. The company builds an AI platform that helps corporates and law firms discover inventions, assess novelty and draft and manage patents.
This article aggregates reporting from 7 news sources. The TL;DR is AI-generated from original reporting. Race to AGI's analysis provides editorial context on implications for AGI development.
Ankar sits right at the intersection of AI and the IP machinery that will govern who captures value from frontier models and agents. By raising $20 million from top‑tier European funds, it’s positioning itself as infrastructure for how ideas become defensible assets in an era where generative models blur originality and prior art. The platform doesn’t just draft text; it searches 150 million patent filings and 250 million scientific papers, evaluates novelty, suggests claims, and tracks prosecution—all with domain‑specific workflows for lawyers and in‑house IP teams.
Strategically, this matters because the race to AGI is also a race to lock down data, algorithms and use‑case moats. Firms that can systematically harvest and protect their inventions will have far more leverage than those treating patents as an afterthought. Ankar’s growth is a signal that sophisticated IP tooling is becoming part of the standard AI stack for serious enterprises.
As more AI R&D is automated and accelerated, the volume and complexity of patentable inventions will spike. Platforms like Ankar could become gatekeepers in that arms race, shaping which ideas get protected, how broad those protections are, and ultimately who can build and deploy the most powerful systems.
