Fearn announced the closing of a $5.5 million seed financing round led by Kindred Ventures, with participation from a16z speedrun, Designer Fund, and Essence VC, to expand its AI-native patent platform designed to streamline patent creation in the first-to-file era.
Founded in 2025 and headquartered in San Francisco, Fearn aims to address what it describes as a two-tier patent system, where organizations with extensive intellectual property resources can secure filings significantly faster than smaller inventors and startups. The company says its platform reduces patent drafting time from more than 50 hours to approximately 20 minutes and lowers costs by as much as 96%.
Fearn’s technology is built around proprietary patent-specific models rather than relying on general-purpose AI systems. Its architecture uses dozens of specialized models designed to minimize hallucinations and ensure compliance with patent prosecution requirements. The platform also includes automated labeled figure generation and supports secure deployment options for enterprise customers.
The company was founded by CEO Han Kim, a former scientific analyst at Morrison Foerster and former Caltech researcher, and CTO Angela Gao, who completed her doctorate at Caltech and previously developed AI models at Google Research. Fearn says its platform is already used by engineers and scientists at organizations including Unity, Dandelion Energy, Serova Bio, Capsule, Syncere, Sans Strings, Taya, and Cainex.
The new funding will support further development of Fearn’s patent models and product capabilities as the company seeks to make high-quality patent drafting more accessible to inventors ranging from solo researchers to enterprise R&D teams.
KEY QUOTES:
“Patents are how inventors turn ideas into lasting value, but in a first-to-file system, the priority date is everything, and access to fast priority dates has been gated by cost, complexity, and institutional connections for far too long. I spent years in Big Law drafting patents the traditional way before building Fearn, and experienced firsthand what the gap looks like. Innovation moves at one speed and protection moves at another, and that mismatch is where inventors lose ground. We built Fearn so protection moves at the speed of the work itself, leveling the playing field for a solo researcher and an enterprise R&D team alike.”
Han Kim, Co-Founder and CEO, Fearn
“Our world is accelerating due to speedups in technology and science, due to human ingenuity and AI model advancements. Intellectual property is the record-of-truth for technology, the design, engineering, and science carta for the world’s industries, and the law and economics code by which we operate as innovators and capital markets. To modernize this critical cortex of our innovation economy, Fearn is developing custom IP-specific models for deeptech, biotech, and hardware companies to quicken and accelerate their drafting and enforceability, and also a multi-model agent harness and patent drafting agent that orchestrates at the speed of GPU compute these once-antiquated and slow workflows.”
Steve Jang, Founder and Managing Partner, Kindred Ventures
“The massive wave of attention on our ambient robotics thesis and inaugural product, the Lume, meant we needed to move incredibly fast to protect our technology. Traditional patent drafting takes months of man-hours, and lots of precious capital, that a pre-seed startup just can’t spare. Fearn changed the game for us, turning our engineering explanations into high-quality drafts in minutes and a fraction of the usual cost, allowing us to lock down our IP overnight and ensure it was fully protected.”
Aaron Tan, CEO and Co-Founder, Syncere
