Stilta has raised $10.5 million in seed funding led by Andreessen Horowitz, with participation from Y Combinator and a group of high‑profile operators from the AI and legal‑tech ecosystem. The startup is building an AI platform that helps companies search, understand, and act on their intellectual property more efficiently.

Its core pitch is simple but powerful: many companies already own patents they have not fully explored, and those assets can carry far more value than they realize. Stilta wants to help legal and business teams rediscover that hidden value by automating the research‑heavy process around patent analysis and litigation.

Patent work is notoriously time‑consuming. Lawyers and in‑house teams often spend hours reviewing related filings, tracing ownership, checking prior art, and sorting through layers of documentation before they can even assess a case or opportunity. Stilta is aiming to compress that workflow by using AI agents to do much of the groundwork.

That places the startup in a growing category of vertical AI tools built for highly specialized professional tasks. Rather than offering a broad legal assistant, Stilta is focused on one of the most demanding corners of the legal workflow: intellectual property research.

The company’s appeal lies not just in speed, but in access. If its platform can help businesses identify patents they had effectively forgotten about, it could unlock strategic options for licensing, enforcement, or portfolio planning. That makes the product relevant not only to legal teams, but also to companies with dormant IP sitting on the books.

Backers like Andreessen Horowitz and Y Combinator suggest strong investor confidence in the idea that AI can meaningfully change how legal work gets done. In an area where precision matters and manual research remains expensive, even modest efficiency gains can have major financial impact.

Stilta now has fresh capital to refine its product, expand its workflows, and prove that AI can make patent intelligence less painful and more valuable. If it succeeds, it could become an important tool for companies trying to turn overlooked intellectual property into a real business asset.