VCs can't get enough of legal startups. Andreessen Horowitz just invested in one taking work from patent lawyers.

Legal tech giant Harvey is racing to help lawyers work faster. Startup Fearn wants to help inventors get further before they ever call a lawyer.

The startup has raised $5.5 million to build AI software that lets inventors draft patents themselves. Fearn is betting that one of legal tech’s biggest opportunities isn’t serving law firms but helping companies do more legal work, including in-house patent drafting.

The company’s investors include Andreessen Horowitzone of Harvey’s most prominent backers. Kindred Ventures led the seed round, with participation from Designer Fund and Essence Venture Capital.

Han Kim, Fearn’s cofounder and chief executive, says the software lets any inventor, from a lone researcher to an enterprise research-and-development team, upload a technical document and create a patent draft with a click of a button. The software scores the quality and completeness of the material provided, creates patent drawings, and shows its sources.

Fearn promises to cut the time to draft from weeks to minutes and charges a flat $2,000 per patent draft. It says it is already used by companies across robotics, pharma, energy, and gaming.

Last year, Fearn’s founders applied cold to Speedrun, Andreessen Horowitz’s 12-week startup boot camp. Kim said he and his cofounder, Angela Gao, were first-time founders who did not know many venture capitalists and had not yet cracked Silicon Valley’s startup networks. Still, they got in.

Investment in legal technology has surged in recent years, rising from roughly $1 billion in 2019 to more than $4 billion last year. Harvey, last valued at $11 billionhas become the clearest example of a now-dominant thesis in the legal industry: artificial intelligence will help lawyers do more work, faster.

But another group of startups is chasing a different opportunity: helping companies bring more legal work in-house and send less of it to outside counsel.

Some startups are building law firms that pair lawyers with software and promise clients quicker, cheaper legal work. Others, like Wordsmith and Sandstone, are building tools for in-house legal teams to run their departments.

Fearn is starting with patent drafting. After a user has drafted an application, they can file it with the patent office or send it to their outside counsel for review.

Kim said the idea came from his own experience prosecuting patents at the elite law firm Morrison Foerster, where he worked before starting Fearn.

In his view, patent drafting was a natural fit for automation for two reasons. First, patents are highly structured documents. Second, patent prosecution requires technical fluency. To prepare and negotiate an application with a patent office, a patent prosector needs to understand the science or engineering well enough to argue what makes an invention new.

That is why many patent prosecutors come from technical backgrounds, Kim said. You do not need a law degree to practice patent prosecution, though you cannot argue patent cases in court without one.

Kim said the standard process can leave inventors feeling like bystanders in the protection of their own work. They know the invention best, he said, but have to trust someone else to translate it into legal language.

“Their primary anxiety, in my experience, has been that the patent lawyer does not understand their invention. They’re going to mangle it,” he said. “But the inventor can’t even tell because it’s written in legalese.”

Kim met his cofounder, Gao, at Caltech, where he studied computational neuroscience, and she completed a PhD in computer science under Katie Bouman, the scientist known for her work on the first image of a black hole.

Fearn is trying to wedge itself into one of legal tech’s most crowded races.

The competition is not just other patent startups, like Patlytics and DeepIP. Patent professionals could use Harvey for parts of the drafting process, even though its chief executive has said patent drafting is not one of the company’s strongest use cases.

Meanwhile, the general-purpose chatbots are getting harder to ignore. Last month, Anthropic announced that users of Solve Intelligence, another patent drafting startup, can access Solve inside Claude’s app. OpenAI, too, is pushing deeper into legal tech, recently hiring the Ironclad founder to lead its work in the field.

Kim said many of Fearn’s competitors came to patent drafting as outsiders chasing a “hot business problem.” Fearn’s advantage may be that one of its founders lived the problem.

“For me, it really started with: My old job kind of sucked,” Kim said. “This really can be automated. It doesn’t have to suck.”