Oskar Block has never been able to 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 difficult data problems,” he told TechCrunch. He went on to consulting, where he helped companies with their AI integration strategies and learned what it took to get large enterprises to embrace the technology.
Block then took a role at an autonomous trucking company, where he saw firsthand how manual and slow the patent process was. The idea for his next company came one evening at dinner with a friend and colleague, Tobias Estreen, when Estreen’s father, a patent attorney, started recounting what his days looked like: “Reading the same kind of documents, the same way he had for thirty years,” Block recalled.
Block and Estreen saw an opening and teamed up with two others, Petrus Werner and Oscar Adamsson, to launch Stilta, an AI platform designed to automate the research and analytical work behind intellectual property cases — the kind of labor-intensive 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 from companies like OpenAI, Legora, and Lovable.
Block, the company’s CEO, said Stilta works like a team of lawyers. Users put a patent number into the software along with any relevant content, and from there, a network of AI agents gets to work, searching for other patents might conflict with the claim, flagging similar property that could apply, and pulling the filing and court history of the patent.
“They reason in parallel and converge the way a room full of specialists would, but at a scale no human team can match,” Block said, adding that the lawyer or professional using the platform is still in the “driver’s seat” by guiding the analysis, not ceding it. “The output is litigation-grade: a report and claim charts with pinpoint citations to every piece of evidence.”
Other companies in this space include Solve Intelligence and DeepIP. Legal tech has become a hot sector amid the broader AI boom. Block said parts of the legal industry are already seeing AI-accelerated change, while other parts may not be ready for it for a long time.
The analytical work, he said, is already being overtaken by AI. For now, it’s still humans deciding the outcomes of cases. He also noted that many companies are holding on to patents they’ve “never enforced, never licensed, never even analyzed properly because the cost of doing so was prohibitive.”
That cost barrier is what Stilta aims to lower. Making the patent litigation process more efficient and affordable could open up new doors for many companies that have long left their IP on the shelf and change how they think about the latent value sitting inside their patent portfolios.
“The question isn’t really whether the legal system is prepared for AI,” Block said. “It’s whether companies are prepared for what becomes possible when the analytical bottleneck disappears.”
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The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) has omitted former Minister of Communications and Digital Economy, Isa Pantami, from its final list of governorship candidates for Gombe State ahead of the February 6, 2027 election.
Politics Nigeria reports that the commission released a list of 16 cleared candidates for the election, but Pantami’s name was missing despite his earlier inclusion in the provisional list published on August 29.
Among the candidates on the final list are Bala Bello Tinka of the African Democratic Congress (ADC), Jamilu Isyaku Gwamna of the All Progressives Congress (APC) and Babayo Ardo Kumo of the Nigerian Democratic Congress (NDC).
Others include Zubairu Mu’azu Halilu of the Labour Party (LP), Lamela L. Silas of the Allied Peoples Movement (APM), Ibrahim Jalo Abubakar of the Peoples Redemption Party (PRP) and Adamu Mohammed Ma’aji of the Social Democratic Party (SDP).
Pantami’s exclusion comes amid a series of legal disputes over his emergence as the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) governorship candidate in the state.
The former minister had initially sought the APC governorship ticket but left the party after it settled for Gwamna as its consensus candidate. He subsequently joined the PDP and emerged as the party’s flag bearer through voice affirmation at its governorship primary.
However, a Federal High Court sitting in Gombe nullified his initial emergence on May 26, following a challenge to the primary process.
The court ordered a fresh primary election, which Pantami won on September 29 with 2,054 votes, defeating Khamisu Ahmed Mailantarki and Usman Aliyu Garry.
Garry had challenged Pantami’s emergence, arguing that the required primary election was not properly conducted before the former minister was declared the party’s candidate.
Despite winning the court-ordered rerun, Pantami’s eligibility remained in doubt following the Supreme Court’s September 24, 2026 judgment on provisions of the Electoral Act 2026 governing political party membership registers and candidate eligibility.
The Supreme Court affirmed the constitutionality of Sections 77(5), 77(6) and 77(7) of the Electoral Act 2026 and upheld INEC’s revised timetable and schedule of activities for the 2027 elections.
The provisions bar political parties from fielding candidates whose names were not included in the membership registers submitted to INEC within the stipulated period.
INEC has maintained that parties found to have violated the requirements will not be permitted to participate in the elections through candidates whose nominations breach the law.
Mohammed Haruna, an INEC national commissioner in charge of information and voter education, said the commission would not allow parties to replace candidates affected by the provisions.
Haruna made the clarification during an appearance on Trust TV’s programme on Wednesday evening, explaining that allowing substitutions would enable political parties to benefit from their own violations.
INEC Chairman, Professor Joash Ojo Amupitan
He cited previous disputes involving Zamfara and Plateau states to illustrate the consequences of parties failing to comply with electoral requirements.
“It’s like you committed an offence. And then, you come and benefit from it,” Haruna said.
He added that allowing parties to substitute candidates in such circumstances would amount to permitting them to benefit from an offence they had committed.
Haruna also indicated that the commission expected to make a definite pronouncement on the implications of the Supreme Court judgment by the following Tuesday.