Tamar Gomez

Tamar Gomez is co-founder and chief executive of Ankar, the London company building AI software for patent professionals. She founded it with Wiem Gharbi, its co-founder and chief technology officer, and the company was incorporated in October 2023. Gomez spent about a decade at Palantir and Helsing building AI systems for companies and governments, including work that covered the full life of a patent. She holds a PhD in game theory and microeconomics from Imperial College London and a master’s degree from HEC Paris. Gharbi, a data scientist by training, worked on machine learning applications at Palantir, where the two met.

A hodgepodge of manual processes

At Palantir both founders saw how long it took to turn an engineer’s idea into a patent the company could rely on. “The tools to do so were incredibly legacy or just nonexistent. It was like a hodgepodge of manual processes,” Gomez told Fortune.

Ankar’s platform brings the stages of that work into one place. It searches more than 150 million patent applications and 250 million scientific publications for prior art, helps draft claims and supports responses to patent office objections. Customers include L’Oréal and the law firm Vorys, and the company says customers report an average productivity gain of 40%, with 96% saying they would recommend it to colleagues.

From seed to Series A in seven months

Ankar raised a £3m seed round led by Index Ventures in May 2025. On 17 December 2025 it announced a $20m (£15m) Series A led by Atomico, with Index Ventures, Norrsken VC and Daphni, taking its total to $24m. It had 20 staff at the time and planned to double the team. In March 2026 Tech Nation named Ankar to its Future Fifty cohort of 25 UK scaleups.

“Invention is how we solve humanity’s biggest challenges, yet the systems that protect those ideas are decades out of date,” Gomez said when the round was announced.

Why it matters to UK buyers

For UK manufacturers, life sciences companies and technology firms, patents are how research spending becomes a protected asset, and the work is slow and expensive whether it is done in-house or by outside attorneys. Ankar gives in-house IP teams and patent firms a single system for search, drafting and prosecution. For legal technology resellers and consultancies, it is a specialist product built for one part of legal work rather than a general-purpose assistant.

Gomez has taken a problem she saw first-hand at Palantir and built a company with Fortune 500 customers and an Atomico-led Series A in about two years. For UK IP teams weighing AI for patent work, Ankar is a UK-built option with that track record behind it.