Two former Palantir employees hoping to use AI to transform the process for filing and managing patents have secured $20 million in investment for their London-based startup, Ankar.
The Series A funding round for Ankar was led by venture capital firm Atomico, with participation from Index Ventures, Norrsken, and Daphni. The company had announced a £3 million ($4 million) seed round in May that was led by Index, with support from Daphni and Motier Ventures.
Ankar was founded by Tamar Gomez and Wiem Gharbi in 2024. The pair met while working at Palantir, where they both encountered the time-consuming process of trying to obtain patents for new technology. Gomez, who has a business background, worked as a development strategist for Palantir, while Gharbi, who is a data scientist by training, worked on machine learning applications. They named their new company after an omniscient and powerful knight found in pre-Islamic poetry.
“We are trying to turn IP that has been viewed as a cost center for a very long time into more of a strategic and competitive asset that we need today in a world that is becoming more and more competitive,” Gharbi, who is Ankar’s chief technology officer, told Fortune.
