A startup building the Harvey for patent law has raised $40 million

• Patlytics builds software for law firms and businesses to automate patent filing and litigation.
• The startup has raised $40 million in new funding, putting it out in front of the IP-tech landscape.
• Its CEO says Harvey paved the way, but it can't easily match the nuanced tasks Patlytics handles.

As Harvey and Legora race to become the main AI tool for lawyers, a wave of startups is going deeper, building software for more specialized work. Patlytics is one of them, betting that the future of legal tech won't be broad platforms, but software that can handle the complexity others can't.

Founded by Paul Lee and Arthur Jen, Patlytics automates the entire patent lifecycle, helping customers with everything from invention disclosures and filing to complex portfolio management and IP litigation.

Patlytics tells Business Insider exclusively that it's raised $40 million in a new funding round. SignalFire led the Series B, with participation from N47 and Liquid2 Ventures, as well as industry stalwarts like Jeff Hammes, the former chairman of Kirkland & Ellis, Antiportfolio Ventures, started by former Kirkland lawyer David Fox, and the legal data-intelligence giant Relativity. Patlytics previously raised $35 million in funding.

Before he became a founder, Lee started his career as an investor at Peter Thiel's Mithril Capital, then Tribe Capital. It was his investor's mindset that led him to identify patent law as an area ripe for its own platform. Because the vast majority of disputes settle quietly out of court, he recognized IP as a "massive secretive market."

In March, the venture firm TRAC named Patlytics one of the companies most likely to become tech's next unicorn. The data came from a proprietary artificial intelligence model that TRAC says predicts startups with a 1-in-5 chance of becoming valued at more than $1 billion. In 2023, TRAC picked Harvey, then less than a year old, as a future unicorn. Today it's valued at $11 billion.

Lee said he actually loves it when a prospective customer already uses Harvey or Legora. "That's a qualification check for us because they have the budget and they're pro-AI," Lee said. But, because a general legal tool isn't built for the hyper-specific needs of patent law, he added, "we also know their IP practice hates it." This creates an opening for Patlytics to step in.

The software covers the entire patent prosecution lifecycle, allowing companies to draft applications and receive suggestions on how to respond to government patent office inquiries. Once the patent is secured, Patlytics searches large databases to spot potentially infringing products and begin building claims.

Lee said the startup works with more than 40% of the AmLaw 100 — the hundred highest-grossing law firms in the United States — and grew revenue about tenfold in 2025. Customers include litigation titans Quinn Emanuel and Susman Godfrey, as well as large law firms Latham & Watkins, Morrison Foerster, and McDermott Will & Emery.

Corporate America remains a slightly smaller but faster-growing share of revenue, Lee said. Enterprises like Meta, Panasonic, Ford, and Verizon use Patlytics to map and "prune" their patent portfolios — sorting patents to identify the most valuable ones and drop those that cost more to maintain than they're worth.

A secretive market fills up

Lee argues that going deep on patent law gives Patlytics an edge that broader platforms can't easily match. Even Harvey's chief executive has said as much. At Legalweek last month, Winston Weinberg told Business Insider that Harvey planned to invest in other startups building highly specialized tools for legal work. He specifically named patent drafting as an area of interest.

What looked like a stealth market when Lee started Patlytics has since filled up with startups targeting the patent industry. One of the furthest along is Solve Intelligence, a Y Combinator-backed company that helps patent attorneys draft applications faster and collaborate with clients. Then there's Ankar, founded by two former Palantir employees, which raised $20 million in December to build the "operating system" for patent attorneys.

It's easy to imagine room for multiple winners. US patent applications topped 393,000 last year, according to patent data firm IFI Claims. And Lee noted that the US Patent and Trademark Office is working through a massive backlog of applications across biopharma, software, and semiconductors.

Still, he's betting the market won't stay fragmented for long.

He compared today's IP-tech landscape to video communications before Zoom: a crowded field of narrow tools built for one-off tasks. His pitch is that Patlytics can pull that sprawl into a single platform, becoming the Harvey tailored for patent attorneys.

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