# Stilta

Aiolum story: https://aiolum.com/story/stilta/ · added 2026-11-11 · updated 2026-11-11

**In short.** Stilta (AI agents for patent invalidity, infringement and freedom-to-operate analysis, Sweden): Launched with named enterprise customers, May 2026. Evidence grade E: no revenue figure was checked. Team: 4 co-founders in May 2026, with the first hires planned after the seed round; later headcount not published. Launched February 2026; still running.

AI agents for patent invalidity, infringement and freedom-to-operate analysis · Sweden · AI-native · team of 2 to 10 · still running · group: Legal and law firms

- Outcome: Launched with named enterprise customers, May 2026 (evidence grade of the headline number: E; no revenue figure)
- Launch: February 2026; months from launch to the outcome: 3
- Team: 4 co-founders in May 2026, with the first hires planned after the seed round; later headcount not published
- Outside funding: US$10.5M seed led by Andreessen Horowitz (company release, 19 May 2026)
- Main factor: Niche
- Meters, 1 to 4: evidence strength 1, copyable pattern 1, capital needed 3
- Tags: AI-native, Small team, Funded, Running, B2B, Legal

Links:

- Visit stilta.com: https://www.stilta.com/

**The product.** A web platform where an IP lawyer or an in-house patent team enters a patent number and AI agents do the search work. They look for prior art, compare each claim element with evidence in a claim chart, and cover invalidity, infringement and freedom-to-operate questions. Customers pay per project or through a flat annual site license, as the company's home page states.

**Why it worked.** Stilta works on one specific job, patent disputes, where the work is mostly search and a mistake is costly. The company's pages describe the matters as high-stakes and say each finding is traced to a source document. The founders left McKinsey's AI practice to build it, and the company says an analysis reaches a first draft in 30 minutes.

Evidence grades: A = disclosed by a public company, a filing or a payment processor, or verified by one; B = two or more independent reports agree, or a journalist confirmed it; C = a founder claim that no one else verified; D = reported, not verified: one founder claim or a third-party estimate with no second source; E = no revenue figure found, so the headline is a non-money fact and the other facts carry their own grades; calc = computed on this page from graded facts.

## Summary

Stilta sells AI software for patent disputes, built by four co-founders in Stockholm. In an invalidity analysis, a lawyer looks for prior art, which means earlier patents, papers or web pages that already describe the invention. The company says its agents search 180 million patents, 250 million scientific publications and over a trillion archived web pages. They then fill in a claim chart, a table that sets each element of a patent claim against the evidence found.

Stilta launched in February 2026. The company said in a release on 19 May 2026 that Andreessen Horowitz led a US$10.5 million round. The same release names Roche, Alfa Laval and Maersk as customers. LawSites, a legal-technology news site, reported that the company was founded in December 2025 by four former McKinsey engineers.

No revenue figure was found, so this story has no money headline and is grade E. LawSites reported that Stilta did not disclose revenue, pricing or customer counts. The funding round, the customer names and the line "Trusted by 100+ IP teams" on the home page are all statements by the company. The product, the founders and the funding announcement are described by the company's own pages and by two news reports.

## Why did Stilta work?

### It targets patent disputes, a narrow job with high stakes

The home page lists invalidity, non-infringement, freedom-to-operate and infringement work, all within patent work. LawSites reported that CEO Oskar Block named Patlytics and Solve's Charts product as his closest competitors. He argued that most other patent-AI tools focus on prosecution, not litigation. The company calls the matters it serves "high-stakes".

### The company says every finding links to its source

The home page says every finding is "100% cited to its source". Its FAQ says quotes appear verbatim and the attorney is always the final author. These are the company's claims. No outside review of the citations was found, and the company's own benchmark figures were not checked.

### It trains its own model to lower the cost of each comparison

The company said on 15 October 2026 that its post-trained model runs 5,000 claim charts per hour on one NVIDIA H100 GPU. It also said the cost is US$0.65 per 1,000 comparisons, against US$132 for the leading frontier model. These are company figures from its own tests. The same page says the work is ongoing and early access is open to a limited number of customers.

## How it was built

These details come from the company's own pages and from two news reports. They are grade C.

- The agents search patents, scientific papers and archived web pages. LawSites reported that the archive part uses an integration with the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine. It also reported that agents pull prosecution history from the US Patent and Trademark Office.
- In October 2026 the company said it was integrating LexisNexis patent and European patent litigation data into its platform.
- The company says its own model is NVIDIA Nemotron 3.5 Lightning, post-trained on real litigation claim charts, and that it is deployed on Microsoft Azure. One passage of that page uses the future tense for the Azure deployment.
- The home page says each customer runs on its own Azure Kubernetes isolation, hosted in Sweden Central by default. The security page says model providers retain none of the content they process.

Sources: [1, 13, 11, 2, 8]

## Who tried this before Stilta, and why did they fail?

Two companies in our database of failed startups promised to automate skilled professional work with AI for organizations. The values below are from that database, read on 11 November 2026, and are not independently verified.

The failed startups come from our database of dead startups, retold here in our own words; Its entries are AI-assisted summaries of public sources, so they carry no evidence grade.

### ROSS Intelligence (2015 to 2018; funding US$13.0M; cause: Competition)

- Promise: AI-powered legal research that sifts large legal databases for case law and documents.
- Why it died: It gained too little traction against incumbents with decades of data. The page names Westlaw and LexisNexis, high switching costs and long sales cycles.
- Record: 

### Olive AI (2012 to 2023; funding US$852.0M; cause: Unit economics)

- Promise: Software bots that automate hospital administration, such as prior authorization, claims denials and billing.
- Why it died: Sales promised autonomous AI, but each client needed custom integrations. The page says the cost to serve each customer was far higher than revenue.
- Record: 

## What changed

Both predecessors promised to automate expert work and met buyers who were slow to trust it. ROSS sold AI legal research against Westlaw and LexisNexis, and its record says the AI was not seen as a complete replacement. Olive's record says its bots needed custom work for each client.

Stilta differs in ways that its own pages state. It takes one task, claim analysis for patent disputes, not a whole profession. It says every finding is traced to a cited document and that the attorney is the final author. Its newest data partner, LexisNexis, is one of the incumbents that the ROSS record names. Whether this is enough is not shown, because no revenue figure exists.

## Can one person copy Stilta now?

**Verdict: Not as a one-person project; the narrow-task pattern, yes.**

A solo copy of Stilta is unlikely, because the company says it raised US$10.5 million. LawSites reported that four former McKinsey engineers founded it. The pattern is still usable: one expensive, search-heavy job, with every answer tied to a source document. A smaller field with the same shape may need less capital.

1. Pick a job in which professionals spend weeks searching documents before they can decide.
2. Make every output cite the passage that supports it, so the professional can check it in minutes.
3. Charge per project at first, and offer a flat license to teams that use it often.

**What is still open.** Other document-heavy disputes and filings, such as trademark clearance, regulatory submissions or insurance claims, where a source-backed answer saves days of work.

## How much revenue does Stilta make? The numbers, graded

A patent-litigation AI product with named enterprise customers and a US$10.5 million seed round, both stated by the company. No revenue figure exists

| Fact | Value | Grade | Note | Sources |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Product launch | February 2026 | C | The company's release of 19 May 2026 says "Since launching in February 2026". LawSites repeats that the product launched in February. | [4, 1] |
| Company start | December 2025 (LawSites); "Founded in 2026" (company release) | C | The two sources differ. The Terms of Service name Stilta IP AB as the provider and carry the dates January 2026 and April 2026. No company register entry was read. | [1, 4, 9] |
| Team at the funding announcement | 4 co-founders | C | The release says the first hires come "beyond the four founders". The About page lists four co-founders, with Oskar Block as CEO. | [4, 3] |
| Outside funding | US$10.5 million seed round, 19 May 2026 | C | The company said Andreessen Horowitz led it, with Y Combinator and AI founders taking part. LawSites reported it is the first outside funding. | [4, 1, 7] |
| Customers named by the company | Roche, Alfa Laval, Maersk; three of the five largest IP firms as customers or in pilots | C | The company's release says so. Non Billable repeats the claim for Roche and Maersk. No customer was quoted by a news report. | [4, 6] |
| Customer mix, from the CEO's briefing | about two-thirds corporate IP teams, one-third law firms; US and Europe about 50/50 | C | LawSites reported what CEO Oskar Block said in a briefing. No customer count was given. | [1] |
| Pricing model | per project, or a flat annual site license, not per user | C | The home page FAQ states it. No amount is published. | [2] |
| Revenue, pricing amounts and customer counts | not disclosed | E | LawSites: "Stilta did not disclose revenue, pricing, or customer counts." No payment-processor profile or filing was found. | [1] |
| Hosting and data location | Microsoft Azure; Sweden Central by default, US residency available | C | The home page FAQ and the security page say so. | [2, 8] |
| Own patent-analysis model | NVIDIA Nemotron 3.5 Lightning, post-trained by Stilta | C | The company's press page of 15 October 2026 states it. The benchmark results on that page are the company's own. | [11] |
| Programs the company lists | Y Combinator W26, Microsoft for Startups, NVIDIA Inception Program | C | The footer of the company's pages lists them. The Y Combinator Winter 2026 batch is also described in the company's post of 20 January 2026. | [2, 5] |
| Open roles in November 2026 | 2 engineering roles in Stockholm, plus an open application for Stockholm and New York | C | The careers page lists them. LawSites reported plans for a New York office by the end of 2026. | [12, 1] |

How to read this table. Grade C is a statement by the company, repeated by a news report that did not check the contracts. Grade E marks something that was looked for and not found. No value is grade A or B.

## Pricing

How Stilta charges, from the FAQ on the company's home page, read 11 November 2026 (grade C)

| Plan | Per month, billed yearly (US$) | Per month, billed monthly (US$) | Limit |
|---|---|---|---|
| Per project |  | price not published | pay only for the matters brought through |
| Site license | price not published |  | unlimited use across a team; flat annual fee |

The home page gives two options and no amount. The /pricing address of the site answers 404, and the Internet Archive's availability check returned no copy of it. LawSites reported that the company did not disclose pricing. The company says it does not charge per user.

## When did Stilta launch, and how did it grow? Timeline

From a founding in December 2025 to an own patent-analysis model in October 2026, in about 10 months. Each entry carries its grade.

- **December 2025** (grade C [1, 4]): Stilta is founded in Stockholm by four former McKinsey engineers, according to LawSites. The company's own release says 2026.
- **20 January 2026** (grade C [5]): The company posts that it joined the Y Combinator Winter 2026 batch. It also says it already has paying customers: law firms and corporate IP teams.
- **February 2026** (grade C [4]): Formal launch of the product, according to the company's release.
- **19 May 2026** (grade C [4, 1]): Stilta announces a US$10.5 million seed round led by Andreessen Horowitz. LawSites calls it the first outside funding.
- **10 September 2026** (grade C [10]): The company publishes a benchmark with Maersk's IP team on matching patents to products. It reports 88% agreement with Maersk's own labels.
- **15 October 2026** (grade C [11]): The company says it trained its own model on NVIDIA's Nemotron to compare patent claims with products and earlier publications.

## What could go wrong for Stilta?

- **What is not verified.** No revenue figure was found. The company's release, the CEO's briefing and two news reports give no revenue, price or customer count. LawSites reported that Stilta did not disclose them. The customers Roche, Alfa Laval and Maersk are named by the company, and none was quoted by a news report. The company's post of 20 January 2026 says it already had paying customers, while its release dates the launch to February 2026. No independent source confirms that these customers pay. A reader could look for the annual report of Stilta IP AB in the Swedish company register, which was not read. A customer's own statement would also help.
- **Trust signals on the home page.** The home page shows a "Trusted by 100+ IP teams" counter above a row of eight logos, with no date or source. It also says the product is "Used on high-stakes patent matters by Fortune 500s and AmLaw 100s". Five named testimonials appear on the page, and the company published them. The FAQ calls Stilta "ISO 27001 certified". The security page mentions an "ISO 27001 certificate" and also says the system is "aligned to ISO 27001". The SOC 2 Type II report is offered in a trust center that was not opened. The home page also says "Backed by NVIDIA and Microsoft", and the About page says Stilta is "backed by Microsoft". The footer lists only the programs Microsoft for Startups and NVIDIA Inception Program. A second row of six logos stands next to the line "Built by a team from the frontier of AI and legal tech". The logos are NVIDIA, Azure, QuantumBlack, Legora, AWS and Google. The footer shows GDPR and EU AI Act badges with no certificate or source.
- **The company names its closest competitors.** LawSites reported that CEO Oskar Block named Patlytics and Solve's Charts product as the closest competitors. LawSites also reported that Patlytics closed a US$40 million Series B in April 2026. Both named competitors have raised funding.
- **Team size after the round is not known.** The release says the money pays for the first hires beyond the four founders. The careers page lists two engineering roles in Stockholm in November 2026. The current headcount is not published, and a team of more than 10 would change the label of this story.

## Sources

1. LawSites, 19 May 2026: Stilta, A Swedish Startup Bringing Agentic AI To Patent Litigation, Raises $10.5M Seed Led By Andreessen Horowitz — https://www.lawnext.com/2026/05/stilta-a-stockholm-startup-bringing-agentic-ai-to-patent-litigation-raises-10-5m-seed-led-by-andreessen-horowitz.html (grade C). Read in full, 11 November 2026. Journalist's report of a company briefing and release. Source for the founding date, the funding, the customer mix and the missing revenue.
2. Stilta home page — https://www.stilta.com/ (grade C). Read in full, 11 November 2026. Source for the pricing model, the hosting, the logo wall and the counter. The /pricing page answers 404.
3. Stilta About page — https://www.stilta.com/about (grade C). Read in full, 11 November 2026. Source for the four co-founders and their roles.
4. Stilta press release, 19 May 2026: Stilta raises $10.5 M, led by Andreessen Horowitz — https://www.stilta.com/news/stilta-raises (grade C). Read in full, 11 November 2026. The company's own release. Source for the launch month, the customer names and the funding.
5. Stilta post, 20 January 2026: Stilta joins Y Combinator — https://www.stilta.com/news/stilta-joins-y-combinator (grade C). Read in full, 11 November 2026. Company post. Source for the Winter 2026 batch and the statement about paying customers.
6. Non Billable, 20 May 2026: The latest legal AI startup from Stockholm is coming for patent lawyers — https://www.nonbillable.co.uk/news/legal-ai-startup-from-stockholm-coming-for-patent-lawyers (grade C). Read in full, 11 November 2026. Independent news report that repeats the company's claims about customers and funding.
7. Scaling Europe, 19 May 2026: Stilta secures €9.7M Seed to automate patent litigation research — https://scalingeurope.co.uk/dispatches/funding-stilta-10-5m (grade C). Read in full, 11 November 2026. A short funding note that says it was originally reported by TechCrunch; it adds no figure of its own.
8. Stilta Security page — https://www.stilta.com/security (grade C). Read in full, 11 November 2026. Source for the hosting, the data rules and the wording on ISO 27001 and SOC 2.
9. Stilta Terms of Service — https://www.stilta.com/dpa/terms (grade C). Read in full, 11 November 2026. Names Stilta IP AB as the provider.
10. Stilta customer story, 10 September 2026: From patent to portfolio analysis (Maersk benchmark) — https://www.stilta.com/news/maersk-portfolio-benchmark (grade C). Read in full, 11 November 2026. The company's own account of a benchmark with Maersk's IP team.
11. Stilta press page, 15 October 2026: Stilta Reinvents Patent Work With NVIDIA — https://www.stilta.com/news/stilta-nvidia-partnership (grade C). Read in full, 11 November 2026. Source for the own model and the company's cost figures.
12. Stilta Careers page — https://www.stilta.com/careers (grade C). Read in full, 11 November 2026. Source for the open roles.
13. Stilta press page, 21 October 2026: Stilta integrates LexisNexis global patent and European patent litigation data — https://www.stilta.com/news/stilta-lexisnexis-partnership (grade C). Read in full, 11 November 2026. Source for the data integration.
14. Database of failed startups, local export — /method/#dead (grade C). Record pages read on the website on 11 November 2026. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors.

Contact: aiolum@livyden.com. Run Stilta? Send corrections or a verified figure to aiolum@livyden.com (subject: Correction: Stilta).