Founded in 2023 by a heavyweight team led by former patent attorney and CEO Dominic Davies, Lightbringer enables you to go from idea to filed patent application in days instead of months, at a fraction of the cost. Originally targeted at patent lawyers to make their work faster, Lightbringer now builds for innovators, engineers and founders directly to help them protect their invention. Lightbringer closed its $10m Series A in June, Davies says that one of its USPs is that “we’re an AI-patent platform, not a law firm with a chatbot bolted on.” Here’s everything you need to know.
How would you describe your company to a friend?
I spent 20 years as a patent attorney before I built Lightbringer, and the thing that never stopped bothering me was watching good founders shelve patentable ideas because a filing meant a five-figure quote and a six-month wait. Lightbringer fixes that: you can go from idea to filed patent application in days instead of months, at a fraction of the cost, and every application is still prepared and signed off by a real, qualified attorney.
And to a techy?
We’re an AI-patent platform, not a law firm with a chatbot bolted on. AI does the heavy lifting, drafting, prior art search, portfolio monitoring, and a named attorney reviews and signs every filing. We cover the whole lifecycle: invention capture through drafting, filing, portfolio strategy, competitor intelligence, and white-space analysis, all in one place.
When were you founded?
2023
By who?
It was founded by me (Dominic Davies), Markus Andreasson, and Ola Wassvik. I ran my own patent consultancy for nine years and kept building software to automate the parts of the job that shouldn’t have needed a human. Markus spent 25 years writing software at Sony, Voyado, and FlatFrog and holds more than 50 patents himself. Ola co-founded FlatFrog and managed over 300 patent families raising close to $100M, he’s lived the “accidental IP manager” problem from the inside, which is exactly who we built this for.
Who are your key managers/senior execs?
Dominic Davies, CEO and co-founder; Markus Andreasson, CTO and co-founder; Ola Wassvik, CCO and co-founder.
Who are your target clients?
Deep tech companies: AI, quantum, robotics, climate tech, medtech, defence. These are founders whose technology is the company, but who are the least equipped to protect it: no in-house IP team, no time to sit through a six-month engagement with a traditional firm.
What is your plan (growth strategy)?
We’re deep into Europe already and now pushing into the US, backed by the $10M Series A we closed in June. Most founders still treat a patent as a cost centre., something you deal with once you can afford it. I’d argue it’s the opposite: the patent you keep postponing is the leverage your competitors won’t have to negotiate around later.
Part of that US push is Lightbringer MCP, which we’re rolling out through private beta now. It puts patent management directly inside ChatGPT, Claude, and Cursor, so an engineer can capture an invention or check portfolio strategy without leaving the tool they’re already building in. Patents shouldn’t live in a separate app you only open when you’re already behind.
Key achievements?
We’ve taken the time to file a patent from around two months down to a couple of days, and cut the cost by up to half. Since 2024 we’ve worked with more than 200 deep tech companies across 17 countries. In Q2 this year, our revenue was up 300% year on year.
Have you received investment?
In June 2026, we raised $10 million in Series A funding in a round co-led by London-based 6 Degrees Capital and Amsterdam-based Newion, alongside existing investors Luminar Ventures and Alliance VC, bringing the company’s total funding to $15 million.
Have there been any key changes in direction since you were founded?
Yes, we didn’t start out building for innovators. The first version of Lightbringer was AI tools for patent lawyers, making their existing work faster. It took me a while to realise that was the wrong bet.
Law firms are conservative for good reason, and a lot of them are built around billing by the hour. We were building something that shrinks the hours. That’s not a partnership, that’s a conflict of interest baked into the business model.
So we flipped it. We stopped selling to the lawyers and started building for the innovators directly, the engineers and founders who actually have the invention. That’s the bigger opportunity anyway. The legal world is going to reshape itself around AI whether law firms want it to or not, and we’d rather build for where it’s going than sell tools to people defending where it’s been.
What are the key challenges in your market?
Two things collide in this market, and most people only clock one of them.
First, there’s a real shortage of patent attorneys with deep technical expertise: quantum computing, novel materials, advanced AI architectures. Generalist attorneys often can’t fully grasp what’s actually patentable about work like that, and with filings hitting record levels, that gap isn’t closing, it’s widening.
Second, founders wait too long. They wait for the funding round, or until the invention feels “finished,” and by then the best window to protect it has usually already closed. The real risk in this market has never been the cost of filing. It’s the IP that never gets protected at all and once that window’s gone, you can’t get it back.
Most legal AI so far has just made law firms more efficient at protecting their own margins. That doesn’t solve either problem. We built Lightbringer to solve both at once.
Tell us something people don’t already know about the company?
Our AI didn’t work for the first decade. I’d been trying to build software that could write patents since long before Lightbringer existed, and for years it just wasn’t good enough. I’d basically given up on it working in my lifetime.
Then in 2022, I read GPT-3 was available via API, plugged it into the same project I’d been quietly failing at for ten years, and it sprang to life. Euphoric and terrifying in the same breath: euphoric because it finally worked, terrifying because the problem I’d spent a decade of my career on had just been solved overnight. I didn’t sleep properly for a month.