McKinsey is famous for turning ambitious young consultants into slide-deck machines.
Former associates Oskar Block and Oscar Adamsson learned the language of corporate persuasion inside the firm, then used it to sell their own startup idea.
Their company, Stilta, helps businesses spot and fight patent violations using artificial intelligence-powered software. Founded in January of this year, it quickly raised a $10.5 million seed round led by Andreessen Horowitz.
Other investors include Y Combinator and employees from AI companies, including OpenAI, Lovable, and Legora, a $5.6 billion startup building software for law firms and corporate legal teams.
Block left McKinsey with a thesis that intellectual-property work — long dominated by lawyers, spreadsheets, and painstaking manual review — was ready for an agentic upgrade.
To build it, he and Adamsson teamed up with two other members of the McKinsey orbit: Tobias Estreen, a lead data scientist at QuantumBlack, McKinsey’s AI arm, and Petrus Werner, a data engineer there.
“A lot of companies today sit on this huge patent portfolio,” Block said. “They typically just place them in a drawer.”
Stilta works by breaking down patent analysis into a series of tasks that agents can run in parallel. A lawyer first defines the objective, whether they are trying to find other patents that infringe on theirs, defend against a lawsuit, or analyze a patent portfolio.
From there, the company says its agents search across patents, academic papers, file histories, web archives, and other sources, looking for evidence tied to the patent at hand. Then, more agents map the evidence to “claims” — the parts of a patent that define exactly what the inventor says they own — and cite their sources.
Stilta’s pitch is that the agents handle the slog of searching and organizing evidence, while attorneys stay in control of deciding what to do with the information.
Today, Block said about 60% of Stilta’s revenue comes from law firms, while 40% comes from corporate legal departments. Enterprise customers include Roche and Danish logistics giant Maersk. He argues the software could help those in-house teams rein in legal bills by keeping more patent work inside the company instead of sending it to outside counsel.
Patent work has become one of legal tech’s newest battlegrounds. Stilta competes with companies like Patlytics and DeepIP, which are building tools for the full patent lifecycle, from drafting to enforcement.
Andreessen Horowitz has made more than one bet that patent work is ripe for disruption. In June, Fearn, a startup that lets inventors draft patents themselves, announced it had raised a seed round from investors including a16z Speedrun, the firm’s accelerator.
Block said Stilta had multiple meetings with Andreessen Horowitz over a “very short” fundraise.
“We made choices about who we wanted on the cap table and prioritized the fit with a16z,” Block said. “That meant we turned down all other term sheets we got.”
Stilta shared its pitch deck exclusively with Business Insider.
