Stilta raises $10.5M from a16z and YC to help companies rediscover the patents they forgot they had
Stilta has raised $10.5 million in a seed round led by Andreessen Horowitz to automate patent research and analysis. The startup aims to make patent litigation more efficient and affordable, allowing companies to better utilize their intellectual property. Stilta's AI platform mimics the work of a team of lawyers, providing litigation-grade reports and analysis.
- ▪Stilta is an AI platform designed to automate the research and analytical work behind intellectual property cases.
- ▪The startup raised $10.5 million in a seed round led by Andreessen Horowitz, with participation from Y Combinator and others.
- ▪Stilta's software allows users to input a patent number and relevant content, enabling AI agents to search for conflicting patents and relevant information.
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Story provenance
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Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | TechCrunch |
| Canonical URL | https://techcrunch.com/2026/05/19/legal-tech-announced-stilta-announces-10m-seed-backed-by-yc-and-a16z-months-after-launch/ |
| Publication time | Tue, 19 May 2026 12:00:00 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-19T12:04:57.562Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-19T13:10:06.927Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | mhaTyZMzkqKr · 2 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Oskar Block has never been able to stay away from entrepreneurship for long. He was just 18 when he launched his first startup, building machine learning models for sports betting. “I’ve always been drawn to solving difficult data problems,” he told TechCrunch. He went on to consulting, where he helped companies with their AI integration strategies and learned what it took to get large enterprises to embrace the technology. Block then took a role at an autonomous trucking company, where he saw firsthand how manual and slow the patent process was.
…
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at TechCrunch.
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