Oskar Block

Oskar Block moved away from his family at 15 to the very northern part of Sweden for sports, he said on a podcast. At 18 he combined that interest with math and built his first company, which made predictive models for soccer betting. He is now co-founder and CEO of Stilta, which builds AI agents for patent litigation.

Treating McKinsey Projects as Startup Ideas

Block later bootstrapped another company past $1 million in revenue and 25,000 monthly active users, and worked at McKinsey, Goldman Sachs and two Swedish unicorns, according to Stilta's YC profile. At McKinsey he treated every project as a startup opportunity in disguise, he said on the podcast. Stilta grew out of one of them, helped by a co-founder whose father was a patent attorney.

He teamed up with Oscar Adamsson and two McKinsey colleagues from its QuantumBlack AI unit, Tobias Estreen and Petrus Werner, according to Business Insider. "A lot of companies today sit on this huge patent portfolio," Block said. "They typically just place them in a drawer."

Turning Down Term Sheets to Take a16z's Seed

Stilta was founded in January 2026 and raised a $10.5 million seed led by Andreessen Horowitz. "We made choices about who we wanted on the cap table and prioritized the fit with a16z," Block told Business Insider. "That meant we turned down all other term sheets we got." About 60% of its revenue comes from law firms and 40% from corporate legal departments, with enterprise customers including Roche and Maersk.

Mapping 868 Prior Art References in Half an Hour

In a demo for LawSites, Stilta's agents surfaced 868 prior art references in roughly half an hour and mapped them against each claim limitation in a claim chart. Longer term, Block said, Stilta wants to become "the full IP operating system" for corporate IP teams and law firms.