This year, London IP Week 7.0 introduces an exciting new feature: The Startup Gallery. We had the pleasure of speaking with Tamar Gomez, Co-founder of Ankar.ai, one of the innovative startups featured in our gallery. Ankar.ai, an AI-powered IP intelligence platform, uses AI agents to enhance IP teams throughout the entire IP lifecycle, from prosecution to litigation.
Tamar brings a wealth of experience, having graduated from HEC Paris in 2013, pursued a PhD in Game Theory at Imperial College, and worked at Palantir Technologies deploying AI software in high-stakes environments. Tamar co-founded Ankar.ai with Wiem Gharbi to revolutionise IP management with cutting-edge AI solutions.
Catch Tamar’s insights during her Startup Pitch on day one of London IP Week this December. But before that, dive into her blog and enjoy her perspectives now!
What inspired you to develop your IP solution/product, and what specific problem in the IP industry are you aiming to solve?
Ankar’s mission is to develop innovative AI solutions that create completely novel ways of protecting IP.
We have learned through working with the world’s leading government and commercial organisations that innovation is what accelerates an organisation's growth and lets it set itself apart from peers, competitors or adversaries. Be it global warming or population ageing, innovation is always the key to seeing us through the challenges we face, and we view Intellectual Property as no less than the fuel to that innovation engine.
My co-founder and I saw first-hand how inefficient the innovation process has become everywhere, getting from idea to patent to commercialised product is slow, siloed and manual. Protecting IP is equally complex and manual.
IP teams are underserved by existing tools that are not set-up to leverage the technological shift of GenAI. With Ankar, we are ushering in a new era for IP professionals where they can leverage AI to do what they do best, fuel and protect innovation.
What innovative features or technologies does your product/solution incorporate, and how does it differentiate itself from existing solutions in the market?
Ankar leverages specialised proprietary models trained by and for IP professionals on millions of patents, research publications, products documentation and case law. Our platform is specialised for IP and our performance on a range of IP-specific tasks reflects that.
With Ankar, IP teams can focus on the most valuable inventions. They collaborate with R&D teams to take an invention and generate a patent draft in minutes, when months of back and forth were required. They can compare technical designs with the prior art and identify design-around options to bring their invention to the market safely and at pace.
On Ankar, IP teams can monitor their technology space constantly and at-scale. They are instantly alerted of an infringement and can map third-party portfolios to their technology and vice versa. Our data coverage is unmatched: we check for infringement and novelty on marketplaces, social media, youtube, websites, press releases and much more.
With Ankar, users can future proof their products by checking for infringements automatically. If a patent is blocked, Ankar suggests design-around solutions and performs invalidity search automatically.
IP leaders and their companies are most worried about security when engaging with AI. We have baked enterprise grade security and access control into the very foundation of our product. It’s not an afterthought for us but a design principle.
How has the market responded to your product/solution so far? Can you share any feedback or success stories from your early adopters?
Ankar is deployed and battle-tested everyday by the leading IP firms of the world in sectors ranging from automotive, to consumer goods, to telco. With Ankar, one customer was able to detect large infringements of their patents, generate claim charts and argue for damages within days not weeks. Another customer was able to halve their invention disclosure backlog and focus on the most valuable inventions in their portfolio.
One of our users mentioned that the infringement detection tool has become their day-to-day work tool now and that when he demoed it to his colleagues who had not been onboarded yet, they ‘fell off their chair’ at the speed of retrieval of patents and the ability of the software to analyse and understand complex technical designs or formulations and identify the right patents related.
What major challenges have you encountered during the development and launch of your product/solution, and how did you address these obstacles?
Our platform is changing the way our customers perform their day-to-day work. Rather than spending time on manual tasks they can now focus on the value-adding pieces. This requires a change in ways of working that can be met with concerns and reticence. We are fortunate to work with incredibly forward-thinking IP professionals who know that embracing change is the way to build an unfair innovation advantage.
Furthermore, to handle customers’ concern about deploying a new tool, we offer a risk-free / high agency pilot program. Prospects can test the platform for a month with no attachment and decide whether it’s generating the value they seek. During this phase, we take into account our users’ feedback and tailor our tools to their needs.
What are your future plans for the development and expansion of your product/solution? How do you envision it evolving to meet the needs of the IP market over the next few years.
The Internet was the revolution of distribution, AI is the revolution of content generation. We believe IP teams will need to be equipped with tools able to leverage and accompany this technological movement to ensure that their organisations gain an innovation advantage. Ankar is built exactly for this challenge. To illustrate that: we are deploying a tool that will allow IP teams to automatically detect IP infringement in AI-generated content.
We are not building narrow solutions for bespoke tasks, we are building a platform covering the end-to-end lifecycle of IP. We believe this will allow for compounding data and value across workflows and will de-silo IP, R&D and commercial teams. In a rapidly changing innovative technological landscape, being able to leverage the latest without getting locked in on a solution that will become old in one month’s time, is key to maintaining an innovation advantage.
Are you ready to make waves in IP tech? Join our Startup Gallery and showcase your innovative technology to industry leaders, investors, and potential partners with exclusive 10-minute pitch sessions and exhibition opportunities. We’re looking for cutting-edge IP tech startups, early-stage companies seeking traction, and ambitious teams eager to connect with experts and elevate their visibility in the IP sector. Don’t miss your chance to stand out, gain valuable exposure, and accelerate your growth in the IP landscape!
Interview : Anjana Kumari | Editor : Chi Nguyen | Graphic Designer : Francesca Di Pillo
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