Tagged: patent
5 results
Patent Watch
Patent Watch is an AI platform that turns dormant patent portfolios into revenue. It reads patents, finds products that appear to infringe them, and generates detailed claim charts in about 20 minutes instead of the months it takes patent attorneys by hand. Founded by brothers Alexander and Andreas Stroe and backed by Y Combinator's Fall 2025 batch, the company helps IP teams pursue licensing, litigation, prior-art invalidation, and M&A due diligence.
Stilta
Stilta is a Stockholm-based, Y Combinator (W26) startup building agentic AI for high-stakes patent work. Its platform runs invalidity, infringement, and freedom-to-operate analyses in minutes by deploying networks of AI agents across roughly 180 million patents, 250 million scientific publications, and more than a trillion archived web pages, returning source-backed, auditable claim charts rather than static reports. Founded in December 2025 by four former McKinsey and QuantumBlack engineers, Stilta raised a $10.5M seed led by Andreessen Horowitz and is used by IP firms and in-house teams at large enterprises.
Paul Lee
Paul Lee is the CEO and co-founder of Patlytics, an AI-native platform for patent workflows used by law firms and corporate IP teams. He previously spent a decade in venture capital as a partner at Tribe Capital and Global Founders Capital, and started his career under Peter Thiel at Mithril Capital. In April 2026, Patlytics closed a $40M Series B, and Lee was named to the IAM Strategy 300 Global Leaders list.
Eric Januar
Eric Januar is a co-founder and CEO of BANIQL, a Silicon Valley deep-tech startup reinventing how the world pulls nickel and cobalt out of the ground for electric-vehicle batteries. With 12 years in electronics, battery and semiconductor R&D - including a stint at Merck and a prior startup exit - he helped build BEST (the Baniql Extraction SysTem), a low-temperature, low-pressure process that the company says cuts electricity use by roughly 98 percent and reaches 99.7 percent nickel sulfate purity with net-zero toxic waste. BANIQL closed a US$1.6M seed round in 2024 and completed a 100 kg/month pre-pilot plant by year-end.
Willy Halim
Willy Halim is a chemical engineer and the founder of BANIQL, a San Jose climate-tech startup he started in his backyard in 2021 to refine nickel and cobalt without the heat, pressure, and toxic waste of conventional mining. Trained at UC Berkeley and Cornell and seasoned as a battery engineer in Silicon Valley, he built a low-temperature, atmospheric-pressure chemical process that BANIQL says uses about 80% less energy than industry-standard high-pressure acid leaching, produces net-zero toxic waste, and turns leftovers into fertilizer and construction material. The company raised a $1.6M seed round led by BEENEXT in 2024 and added 500 Global and Genesia Ventures in 2025, aiming first at Indonesia, which holds roughly a quarter of the world's nickel.