Oscar Block could never stay away from entrepreneurship for long.

He was just 18 when he launched his first startup, building machine learning models for sports betting. “I’ve always been drawn to solving hard data problems,” he told TechCrunch. He did consulting, where he helped companies with their AI integration strategies and learned what it takes for large enterprises to adopt the technology.

Block then took a role at an independent trucking company, where he saw firsthand how manual and slow the patent process was. The idea for his next company came one evening over dinner with a friend and colleague, Tobias Estrin, when Estrin’s father, a patent attorney, began describing his day: “Reading the same documents as he had for thirty years,” Block recalled.

Block and Estren saw a start and launched together with two others, Petrus Werner and Oskar Adamson. Stelta, an AI platform Designed to automate the research and analytical work behind intellectual property cases — the kind of laborious work that has historically made patent litigation slow and expensive. The startup announced a $10.5 million seed round on Tuesday, led by Andreessen Horowitz. Other investors include Y Combinator and operators of companies like OpenAI, Legora, and Lovable.

Block, the company’s CEO, said Stelta works like a team of lawyers. Users enter a patent number into the software along with any related content, and from there, a network of AI agents works, searching for other patents that might conflict with the claim, flagging similar property that might apply, and pulling up the patent’s filing and court history.

“They reason in parallel and bring together a room full of experts in a way, but at scale no human team can match,” Block said, adding that the lawyer or professional using the platform is still in the “driver’s seat” guiding the analysis, not leaving it. “The output is the litigation status: a report and claim chart with sign references for each piece of evidence.”

Other companies in this space include Solo Intelligence and DeepIP. Legal tech has become a hot sector amid the broader AI boom. Some parts of the legal industry are already seeing rapid AI change, while other parts may not be ready for a long time, Block said.

Analytics is already outpacing AI, he said. For now, it’s still humans deciding the outcome of cases. He also noted that many companies held patents that they “never enforced, never licensed, never even properly analyzed because the cost of doing so was prohibitive.”

This cost constraint is what Stealta aims to reduce. Making the patent litigation process more efficient and affordable could open new doors for many companies that have long shelved their IP and change how they think about the hidden value within their patent portfolios.

“The question isn’t really whether the legal system is ready for AI,” Block said. “It’s whether companies are prepared for what becomes possible when the analytics barrier is removed.”