Stilta

Cursor for patent practitioners

Winter 2026

Artificial Intelligence

LegalTech

About

Stilta is the AI-native software for patent practitioners, built on agentic workflows to amplify how IP work is done end-to-end. Instead of spending weeks manually researching and drafting patents, practitioners can reduce manual work by up to ~50% while enabling new revenue streams. Innovation is key to solving the world’s most important challenges, but the tools to protect innovation haven’t kept up. Patent teams are stuck doing high-stakes work with a process built around manual document review and disconnected point solutions. Existing tools are rigid and fail by not integrating AI with clear traceability (every output must be source-backed, referenced, and auditable). General LLM solutions generate text, but they don’t solve trust and integration in legal-grade workflows. We’re four engineers from McKinsey/QuantumBlack who’ve spent the last few years building and deploying AI for large organizations. We’re building Stilta because the practitioners protecting the world’s most valuable ideas deserve tools that match the stakes. We’re already live with paying customers in both Europe and the US.

Founders

Oscar Adamsson

Founder

Oscar is co-founder of Stilta - the AI-native software for patent practitioners. Prior to Stilta, Oscar has competed in Math, built products at unicorns, and worked with +50 CEOs at McKinsey. He earned two degrees in business and data & AI from top universities in Sweden (e.g., Chalmers) and selected courses from UC Berkeley and Bocconi.

Oskar Block

Founder

Oskar is CEO and co-founder of Stilta, building Cursor for patent practitioners. Prior to Stilta, he worked at McKinsey, Goldman Sachs, and two Swedish unicorns, where he learned how to scale companies. In parallel, he’s also founded and bootstrapped two sports betting startups to +$1M ARR.

Tobias Estreen

Founder

Tobias is Chief Architect and Co-Founder of Stilta, building the future workspace for IP professionals. Previously at McKinsey & Company, Tobias led teams building agentic AI systems for global clients. With a background in physics and ML from KTH and KU Leuven, he brings deep technical expertise for solving complex challenges.

Petrus Werner

Co-founder & CTO

Petrus is CTO and co-founder of Stilta, building the future workspace for IP professionals. Prior to Stilta, he worked at QuantumBlack (McKinsey & Company) and Amazon Web Services with significant experience in building scalable AI systems.

AI Research Report

Problem & Solution

Problem/Solution report

The core problem

Patent practitioners and corporate IP teams face high-stakes work that remains slow, fragmented and manual. Key pain points include lengthy prior art searches across heterogeneous sources, time-consuming claim mapping and invalidity analysis, disjointed point solutions that don’t integrate into legal-grade workflows, and a lack of traceability and explainability in outputs. General-purpose generative AI can draft text but often lacks source-backed reasoning and auditable trails required for legal and IP work — a critical barrier to adoption in high-risk contexts.

Stilta’s solution

Stilta offers agentic, domain-specific AI agents designed for patent work that combine deep, domain context with transparent outputs. Core capabilities highlighted include:

Infringement monitoring: automated surveillance of competitor products and disclosures with claim-level mapping.
Invalidity analysis: large-scale search across patents (200M+), scientific literature and historical web sources to find supporting evidence.
Portfolio assessment: automated evaluations of legal defensibility, economic value, and competitive activity for pruning, licensing or litigation triage.

The product is built to make every output traceable and auditable (source-backed, referenced), addressing the explainability/trust gap that prevents practitioners from relying on generic LLM outputs.

Value proposition and workflow impact

Stilta positions itself as “the Cursor for patent practitioners”: replacing manual review and disconnected tools with interactive, argument-led agentic workflows. According to public descriptions, Stilta can reduce manual research and analysis work by up to ~60% (YC company description), while producing interactive, steerable, and evidentiary outputs that practitioners can defend in high-stakes settings. The company emphasizes enterprise security (SOC 2 Type II, GDPR, EU AI Act compliance, on-prem/private cloud deployment options) and guarantees customer data is not used to train models — key points for enterprise IP confidentiality.

Market & Competitors

Market and Competitors report

Market landscape and trends

The IP management software market is large and growing (multi-billion USD), driven by rising patent filing volumes, R&D intensity, cross-border IP activity and an increasing need for analytics, monitoring and IP monetization tools. Concurrently, the legal AI market is expanding rapidly as firms adopt AI for e-discovery, drafting, and analytics.
Key market trends relevant to Stilta: demand for explainable/traceable AI, enterprise security and compliance, integrated IP workflows (search → mapping → monitoring → portfolio decisions), and premium pricing for tools that reduce litigation risk or unlock licensing revenue.

Key competitors and adjacent players

Incumbents and established IP/innovation platforms: Clarivate (Derwent, IPfolio), Questel, Anaqua, Patsnap, LexisNexis/PatentSight, PatSeer. These companies offer broad IP management, search and analytics platforms and have deep patent databases and enterprise footprints.
Specialist/analytics/legal AI challengers: PatSnap, IP.com, TurboPatent / other AI drafting and patent prosecution tools; smaller AI startups focusing on legal research and generative legal AI (some may expand into IP workflows).
Cross-category competition: General legal AI and LLM vendors (enterprise OpenAI/Anthropic offerings, AI search startups) for portions of the workflow (drafting, initial search), though these generalist offerings typically lack the auditability and domain agents Stilta emphasizes.

Stilta’s competitive advantages and risks

Advantages:

Domain-specific, agentic architecture designed for traceability and source-backed outputs — directly addresses adoption barriers in legal/IP workflows.
Founders’ credentials (enterprise AI deployment experience at QuantumBlack/McKinsey and AWS) and security posture (SOC 2, GDPR, EU AI Act compliance claims) match enterprise buyer priorities.
Modules aligned to high-value IP tasks (infringement monitoring, invalidity analysis, portfolio assessment) that can shorten time-to-decision.

Risks/weaknesses:

New entrant vs incumbents with established datasets, large sales teams and entrenched enterprise contracts.
Data scale and long-tail coverage (patent corpora, specialized non-patent literature) are essential — incumbents may have advantages there.
Early stage company with a small team; enterprise sales cycles for IP software are long and require strong reference customers.

Total Addressable Market

Quantitative and TAM report

Market context and headline figures

Intellectual property (IP) management software market: estimated at ~$12.3 billion in 2024 and projected to reach ~$24.8 billion by 2030 (Grand View Research).
Legal AI software market (subset of LegalTech that includes AI for contract, litigation, IP): MarketsandMarkets reports a 2024 market size of ~$2.52 billion for Legal AI software with a projected rise to ~$10.82 billion by 2030.
Broader LegalTech market: Grand View Research reports global legal technology market at roughly $26.7 billion in 2024 with projected growth to ~$46.8 billion by 2030 (context for ancillary demand).

Estimated TAM for Stilta’s addressable opportunity

Stilta targets high-stakes patent practitioners (law firms and corporate IP teams) with agentic AI for prior art search, infringement monitoring, invalidity analysis and portfolio assessment. To derive an actionable TAM range for Stilta’s core product (patent analytics + AI workflows), I combine the IP management market and the legal AI market as relevant inputs and apply a reasoned share for the patent-analytics subsegment:

Conservative subsegment estimate: 10% of the 2024 IP management market (patent analytics & portfolio tools) -> ~USD 1.2 billion TAM (2024).
Broader potential (upper bound): if patent analytics plus adjacent AI legal workflows capture 25% of IP management revenue or meaningful share of the legal AI market -> ~USD 3.1 billion.
Additive viewpoint: Legal AI market (2024 $2.52B) suggests substantial upside for AI-native IP tooling; capturing even 5–15% of that market as AI-native patent tooling implies an additional USD 126M–378M of addressable spend.

Therefore a defensible 2024 TAM range for Stilta’s immediate product category is roughly USD 1.2B — 3.1B, with near-term Serviceable Obtainable Market (SOM) for an early company likely in the low-to-hundreds of millions depending on enterprise traction, pricing, and deployment (cloud/on-prem) choices.

Methodology and assumptions

Used published market reports (Grand View Research, MarketsandMarkets) for total market baselines (IP management; legal AI; LegalTech).
Assumed the patent analytics and portfolio management subsegment comprises roughly 10–25% of IP management software revenue based on vendor lists and submarket descriptions in those reports.
Considered legal AI growth and overlap with IP workflows to account for AI feature premium and willingness to pay by enterprise/legal teams.
Adjusted expectations for Stilta’s specialty focus (high-trust, secure, traceable agentic workflows) which can command premium pricing vs generic legal AI tools.

Founder Analysis

Founders and Background report

Founders and roles

Oskar Block — Co-founder & CEO. Previously at McKinsey and Goldman Sachs, and founder of two sports-betting startups he bootstrapped to >$1M ARR and ~25k monthly users. Public bios list experience scaling companies and founding prior startups.
Oscar Adamsson — Co-founder. Product leader with prior product roles at unicorn startups, advised 50+ CEOs while at McKinsey, and has strong mathematical background and coursework from Chalmers, UC Berkeley and Bocconi.
Tobias Estreen — Co-founder & Chief Architect. Previously led AI projects at QuantumBlack (McKinsey) and Netlight; background in physics and machine learning (KTH and KU Leuven), with hands-on experience building agentic AI systems for global clients.
Petrus Werner — Co-founder & CTO. Prior experience building and scaling AI systems at QuantumBlack (McKinsey) and Amazon Web Services.

Professional experience and expertise

The team are four engineers who met at McKinsey/QuantumBlack and have deep experience deploying secure, enterprise AI for Fortune 500 clients. Their combined backgrounds cover product development at high-growth startups, strategy and deployment experience from McKinsey, platform/scale work at AWS/QuantumBlack, and prior founder experience (Oskar). This mix gives the founding team domain knowledge in secure AI, scalable architecture, product execution, and IP/patent workflows — directly relevant to building an AI platform for high-stakes patent work.

Education and notable achievements

Public founder bios cite degrees and coursework from top Swedish technical universities (Chalmers, KTH), KU Leuven, and additional coursework at UC Berkeley and Bocconi. Individual highlights include competitive mathematics (Oscar), successful bootstrapped ventures (Oskar), and leadership of enterprise agentic AI projects (Tobias, Petrus). The company is backed/recognized by Y Combinator (W26) and accelerator/partner programs including Microsoft for Startups and NVIDIA Inception.

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